Abstract
The community development in different domains (business, education, welfare, etc.) has been the prime focus over the last decade due to the evolution of digital technologies and the shift in working patterns. However, many public and private investments have failed to produce sustaining and real value from them. The observed deficiencies which are causing the failure of community development projects ranged from initiation within the artificial and closed laboratory to open learning environments. The community development is entailed without understanding the real community needs, community’s value chain, and potential problems with limited interactions. These shortcomings have resulted in failure to develop effective, prosperous, and world class communities, leveraging the new innovative and powerful approaches. An approach to developing collaborative systems, called Living Lab (LILA), is discussed in this paper and this approach has empowered and engaged the communities (students, lecturers, computer scientists, electronics engineers, visually impaired and blind people) to experiment and learn the innovative solutions of their real-world problems. The theme of this innovation-led approach is to embed community-driven solution within the communities.
This paper presents the actual framework for the establishment of a Living Lab using specific case study at Birmingham City University (BCU), along with its impact on community development. This research determines the key features that the visually impaired would find useful in a mobility cane called “XploR”. The smart cane incorporates facial recognition technology to alert the user when they are approaching a relative or friend from up to 10 m away. This is a revolutionary ‘smart’ cane enabling blind people to instantly identify friends and family. The cane also features GPS functionality to aid navigation. This project is part of LILA, a European initiative encouraging entrepreneurship and fostering internationalisation.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Allee, V. (2008). Value network analysis and value conversion of tangible and intangible assets. Journal of Intellectual Capital, 9(1), 5–24. Retrieved from http://www.openvaluenetworks.com/Articles/Value_Conversion_JIC_online_version.pdf
Baida, Z., Rukanova, B., Liu, J., & Tan, Y. H. (2008). Preserving control in trade procedure redesign—The beer living lab. Electronic Markets, 18(1), 53–64.
Bowyer, K. W., Chang, K., & Flynn, P. (2006). A survey of approaches and challenges in 3D and multi-modal 3D + 2D face recognition. Computer Vision and Image Understanding, 101(1), 1–15.
Calamela, L., Defélixa, C., Picqd, T., & Retour, D. (2012). Inter-organisational projects in French innovation clusters: The construction of collaboration. International Journal of Project Management, 30(1), 48–59.
Chen, C., & Liu, L. Q. (2014). Pricing and quality decisions and financial incentives for sustainable product design with recycled material content under price leadership. International Journal of Production Economics, 147(3), 666–677.
Følstad, A. (2008, August). Living labs for innovation and development of information and communication technology: A literature review. The Electronic Journal for Virtual Organisations and Networks, 10. Special issue on Living Labs. Retrieved from http://iceconference.org/projects/264/Issues/eJOV%20Special%20Issue%20on%20Living%20Labs%202008/eJOV10_SPILL7_Folstad_Living%20Labs%20for%20Innovation%20and%20De velopment.pdf
Haraszy, Z., Cristea, D. G., Tiponuţ, V., & Slavici, T. (2011). Improved head related transfer function generation and testing for acoustic virtual reality development. Latest Trends on Systems, 2, 411–417.
Haraszy, Z., Micut, S., Tiponut, V., & Slavic, T. (2011). Multi-subject head related transfer function generation using artificial neural networks. Latest Trends on Systems, 1, 399–405.
Helal, A., Moore, S., & Ramachandran, B. (2001). Drishti: An integrated navigation system for visually impaired and disabled. In Proceedings of the 5th International Symposium on Wearable Computer, Zurich, Switzerland.
Jackson, T. (2008). Prosperity without growth? London: Sustainable Development Commission.
Jayal, A., Badurdeen, F., Dillon, O., & Jawahir, I. (2010). Sustainable manufacturing: Modeling and optimization challenges at the product, process and system levels. CIRP Journal of Manufacturing Science and Technology, 2(3), 144–152.
Johnsen, T., Phillips, W., Caldwell, N., & Lewis, M. (2006). Centrality of customer and supplier interaction in innovation. Journal of Business Research, 59(6), 671–678.
Kokkinakos, P., Koussouris, S., Panopoulos, D., Askounis, D., Ramfos, A., Georgousopoulos, C., et al. (2012). Citizens collaboration and co-creation in public service delivery: The COCKPIT project. International Journal of Electronic Government Research, 8(3), 30.
Kramp, G., Nielsen, P., & Møller, A. S. (2010). Participatory interaction in therapeutical settings. Working paper. In NordiCHI Conference.
Lee, S. M., Olson, D. L., & Trimi, S. (2012). Co‐innovation: Convergenomics, collaboration, and co‐creation for organizational values. Journal of Management History, Management Decision, 50(5), 817–831.
Liu, J., Baida, Z., & Tan, Y. H. (2007). e-Customs control procedures redesign methodology: Model-based application. In Proceedings of the 15th European Conference of Information Systems, St. Gallen, Switzerland.
Patel, K. K., & Vij, S. K. (2010). Spatial navigation in virtual word. In Advanced knowledge based systems: Model, Application and research (Vol. 1, pp. 101–125).
Sakhardande, J., Pattanayak, P., & Bhowmick, M. (2012). Smart cane assisted mobility for the visually impaired. World Academy of Science, Engineering and Technology, International Science Index 70, International Journal of Computer, Electrical, Automation, Control and Information Engineering, 6(10), 1262–1265.
Schaffers, H., Guzman, J. G., Navarro, M., & Merz, C. (2010). Living labs for rural development. Madrid: TRAGSA. 249 pages. ISBN-13: 978-84-693-0040-4. Retrieved from www.c-rural.eu
Smit, D., Herselman, M., Eloff, J. H. P., Ngassam, E., Venter, E., Ntawanga, F., et al. (2011). Formalising living labs to achieve organisational objectives in emerging economies. In P. Cunningham & M. Cunningham (Eds.), IST-Africa Conference Proceedings. IIMC International Information Management Corporation, ISBN: 978-1-905824-24-3.
Thøgersen, J. (2007). Activation of social norms in social dilemmas: A review of the evidence and reflections on the implications for environmental behaviour. Journal of Ecological Psychology, 28(1), 93–112.
Tiponut, V., Ianchis, D., Bash, M., & Haraszy, Z. (2011). Work directions and new results in electronic travel aids for blind and visually impaired people. Latest Trends on Systems, 2, 347–353.
Tiponuţ, V., Ianchis, D., & Haraszy, Z. (2009). Assisted movement of visually impaired in outdoor environments—Work directions and new results. In Proceedings of the 13-th WSEAS Conference on SYSTEMS (pp. 386–391). WSEAS Press.
Welfens, M. J., Liedtke, C., & Nordmann, J. (2010). Sustainable consumption: Between unsustainable reality and peoples willingness to act (Internal paper). Wuppertal: Wuppertal Institute for Climate, Environment and Energy.
Wong, M. E., & Cohen, L. (2012). Assistive technology use amongst students with visual impairments and their teachers: Barriers and challenges in special education. Singapore: National Institute of Education/Nanyang.
World Health Organization. (2016). Global data on blindness. Facts sheet, key facts of the World Health Organization.
Yu, W., Kuber, R., Murphy, E., Strain, P., & Mcallister, G. (2005). A novel multimodal interface for improving visually impaired people’s web accessibility. Virtual Reality, 9(2), 133–148.
Zarandi, M. H. F., Mansour, S., Hosseinijou, S. A., & Avazbeigi, M. (2011). A material selection methodology and expert system for sustainable product design. The International Journal of Advanced Manufacturing Technology, 57(9), 885–903.
Acknowledgment
Authors wish to express sincere gratitude to Mr. Steve Adigbo (co-founder of Blindx) for rendering his help during this publication and LILA Interreg NWE project for its support to Blindx developers of XploR through the living labs model of transnational user groups.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2017 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this paper
Cite this paper
Majeed, A., Bhana, R., Haq, A.U., Shah, H., Williams, ML., Till, A. (2017). Living Labs (LILA): An Innovative Paradigm for Community Development—Project of “XploR” Cane for the Blind. In: Benlamri, R., Sparer, M. (eds) Leadership, Innovation and Entrepreneurship as Driving Forces of the Global Economy. Springer Proceedings in Business and Economics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-43434-6_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-43434-6_3
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-43433-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-43434-6
eBook Packages: Business and ManagementBusiness and Management (R0)