Unveiling the Social Impact of AI through Living Labs

The Digital Transformation is a human transformation, not just a new industrial revolution, allowing potential access to all human knowledge. Social transformations appear at a pace never witnessed before, with challenges that can no longer be tackled by one organization alone. This makes the flourishing of paradigms of open innovation possible, where the integration of multiple stakeholders around the citizen-centric perspective is a key element. In this context, the impacts that AI will bring to our societies are still to be defined, or more precisely, there is a pending action of unveiling the social impact of AI, and this task has to be done prior to the development of new models in which AI-based automation and automatic decision making will play a fundamental role. Particularly, as an inherent part of the innovation management framework, this will affect strategy, leadership, institutional culture, processes and more — widely beyond the software design tasks. Dimensions such as capacity building, identity(ies), responsibility and creativity are now to be reshaped due to AI. The Living Lab approach appears as a powerful instrument for this mission, and in this chapter we will explore clear examples on how to tackle the unveiling of the impacts on such dimensions.