How To Improve The Knowledge Transfer Models And Methods In Living Labs

The knowledge transfer is a complex activity influenced by many cultural, social and personal factors. It is recognized that a key competence of companies nowadays is to absorb and transform knowledge into innovations – new products, services and processes. The present paper proposes a theoretical approach to analyze the processes of knowledge sharing and knowledge transfer in Living labs with the KS/KT model. Living labs are based on the model of Open Innovations and represent a flexible infrastructure and environment, designed to increase cooperation between companies, end-users, researchers and other stakeholders. By applying the KS/KT model, it is identified and analyzed in details how knowledge is transferred and absorbed in the process of company-users interactions. Therefore, there are discussed different existing practices and phases of interactions in Living labs including: ideation, user- co-creation, user testing and user experience evaluation and others. The main focus is to identify methods and models to improve these practices and to suggest possible recommendations. These results can be further transferred to other open innovation infrastructures and initiatives.