Active and participatory methodologies will be favoured to promote the development of transversal competences, creativity and innovation.
THE LIVING LAB APPROACH
The Living Lab is the approach used by DESCI partnership to design and realize the Alternating Training, through the sharing of ideas and collaboration between the stakeholders: students, institutions, research centres and businesses. The goal is to promote the active involvement of the end users in order to detect the needs of the territory, designing and evaluating interventions that will have a medium- and long-term impact.
The key dimensions of a Living Lab are:
- open innovation – Living Lab approach takes into account all possible sources of innovation, by encouraging their involvement of all stakeholders (research system, enterprises, citizens) in transparent, collaborative and often not codified processes, in which the use of ICT often takes a leading role. Nevertheless ICT is not the only instrument of innovation. Leaving aside ICT, Living Lab can pursue as well social and cultural innovation.
- real-life settings – Deliveries (service/products) are tested in real life setting, making the prototypes available for a sufficiently long time and in the same conditions in which they would be used on a larger scale;
- end-user involvement (“active involvement of the end users“, “user-driven innovation”,“co-creation”)- end users are encouraged to cooperate with researchers, developers and designers to contribute to the innovation process as a whole;
In DESCI the Living Lab approach is present in tree, interrelated, environments:
- Policy Lab for Alternating Training and Consortium: coordination of the network of organizations (schools, research centers, enterprises) that share knowledges and experiences, that support the implementation of DESCI Alternating Training. First participants are the DESCI Partner (DESCI Consortium)
- Teachers’ Living Lab – the Living Lab which is activated in each school, through which the teachers plan, realize and evaluate the implementation scenarios for their school.
- Students’ Living Lab – into the Alternating Training the students can activate a Living Lab for developing innovative industrial delivery, under the tutoring of the teachers, enterprises and researchers.
