Development and implementation environments
Living labs constitute test environments or - initiators, in which applications and services are piloted by human beings in everyday life or in real company and user environments. In the ICT sector new innovations, technology pilots and the testing of applications in real user environments forms a central challenge in the pursuit of bringing products to the market even faster and of strengthening essential users' attitudes. Solutions and methods which have been created and come only from a technology and product perspective have not been able to satisfactorily respond to the users' needs and habits. Equally, in the EU Living Labs are seen as the European Unions' means of closing in quickly on the USA's lead in the ICT industry.
The central challenge of technologies lies in the testing, application, agile servicing, holding of events in real working environments and in productisation. These development environments also supports companies' core networks and the generation of cluster collaboration. They are intended to help increase companies' capacities to bring products to the market in a shorter period of time and to cooperate in the sensible utilisation of collective resources with partners in common environments. Networks offer participants the use of development and test conditions where otherwise acquisitions for single companies or for institutes would be too big an investment and thus, these networks also enable SME's to become involved.
Objectives:
1. The construction of national development and introductory environment networks, in which technologies, special applications and pilot services are carried out.
2. New creations and developments within existing development and implementation environments are supported by user-centered developed applications, the acceleration of pilots and productisation and the general improvement of the pilots' abilities.
3. The acceleration of business innovation and of bringing products to the market by placing emphasis on the integration of the development environments into the companies' and research organisations' own research and development processes. New and sharper-than- before areas of core expertise are already being proposed in strong cutting-edge areas (well-being, intelligent machines) and in the stages of cross-sector development in traditional fields such as biotechnology and environmental technology.
Functions:
1. Clusters benefit a wide range of the community in which development environments already exist by strengthening and expanding their activities. Various location-profiled points ensure a tighter focus and contribution to a particular sub-region
and at the same time, have access to other platforms via a network. Participating locations are equivalent to the national network as part of development environment's regional coordinating.
2. The development of existing environments and the creation of new environments: In Tampere; Wireless Tampere-online services, the Intelligent District of Vuores and printed electronics pilot production environments, In Jyväskylä; Intelligent Himos area, In Oulu; Finland Octopus Network and intelligent transport environment, In Satakunta a.o.t the City of Pori (Pori, WLAN, aided housing development environment), as well as the extension of the housing integration laboratory in Porvoo.
3. Extensive application competitions make it possible for universities to discover new concepts of development and productising applications, and their assessment constitutes part of the development environment.
4. The development environment systematically accumulates critical mass, as well as carrying out segmentation profiling which result in the collation of pools of end-users.