Introduction
Many private and public investments in community development fail to produce real and sustaining value for communities. Some of the deficiencies observed are that traditional community development projects are initiated and executed in a closed and artificial laboratory environment with limited interaction with, and understanding of the real needs, the potential problems and value chains of the community. To effectively design world class sustainable and prosperous communities, new powerful innovation approaches are urgently needed. The approach suggested in this paper, is to build collaborative systems, called Living Labs (LL), for communities which will engage and empower them to experiment and learn in real-world environments and to create innovative solutions to their problems. From an educational perspective the role and important impact of implemented living labs are becoming more evident. Van der Walt & Pretorius (2007) opened an article entitled: Living Lab as an Innovative Tool in Education by explaining that: Today’s ICT learning environments are ventures involving huge streams of course material development, knowledge transfer, and performance measuring systems. The service delivery of many organizations depends on the functioning of these skills production / chains of the academic institutions. This skills production process requires the marketing of students, optimal use of teaching resources and performance analysis. Performance analysis is a complete process and depends on value adding, processes of many role players. Understanding the business, technology and social intersection of the learning environment is critical for the successful analysis of skills requirement. We believe that one of the best tools to promote highly innovative action research in different application areas is through the use of “living labs”. Living labs is a highly evolving theory and practice, related to almost any managerial or technical problem, which can be used to help organizations in knowing where to focus their management attention. According to CoreLabs/ENoLL, (2007:3) a Living Lab enables users to take active part in research and innovation. Living Labs The following section presents various views and definitions from literature in order to clarify and explain the researched topic. In the latter part the researchers aim to provide a working definition for a living lab in the South African context with reference to the envisaged Soshanguve and Venda Living Lab Projects. Living Labs Defined Pallot (2006) argues that a “living lab” (LL) is neither a traditional research lab nor a “testbed”, but rather an “innovation platform” that brings together and involve, or in stronger words, engage all stakeholders such as end-users, researchers, industrialists, policy makers, and so on at the earlier stage of the innovation process in order to experiment breakthrough concepts and potential value for both the society (citizens) and users that will lead to breakthrough innovations. A European Network of Living Labs, ENoLL, has been established (Nov. 2006) and comprises (Nov. 2007) 52 Living Labs in eighteen of the twenty five European Union member states. European Network of Living Labs (2006, p. 1) define living labs as: “The Living Lab is a system and environment for building a future economy in which real-life user-centric innovation will be the normal co-creation technique for new products, services and societal infrastructures.” Lama and Origin (2006, p. 6) describe living labs as “a user-centric research methodology for sensing, prototyping, validating and refining complex solutions in multiple and evolving real life contexts.” Living labs challenge us to examine new technologies in everyday contexts as used by people to achieve their goals. In this context, people from different areas of life explore innovative tools by interacting with them and discovering new ideas to expand their knowledge and to explore ways of acting
