REWAISE at the Digital Living Lab Days to co-create its methodology for water innovation

REWAISE took part in the Open Living Lab Days organised by ENoLL from September 6 to 10. The project coordinator, Frank Rogalla from Aqualia, and Beatriz Medina, project partner from WE&B, led the workshop “Unleashing the Value of Living Labs for Resilient Water Innovation Economy”. This session provided an interactive collaboration space to enable the first REWAISE Living Lab methodology to be shaped jointly.

Living Labs provide a real field for developing, testing, validating and integrating a combination of solutions, new business models and innovative policies based on the value of water. The current project methodology focuses on a series of topic areas that were raised during the workshop:

  • The Value of Living Labs, with case studies from different approaches for quadruple helix engagement
  • How to set up Living Labs around Europe and beyond, including governance models and stakeholder engagement methodologies
  • Real-life experimentation in Living Labs, exploring the importance of user feedback gathering and offering a set of best practices
  • Evaluating the impact of Living Labs, including the evaluation feedback and the socio-technological impact assessment.

The session, focused on “Resilient Water Innovation for a Smart Economy”, was attended by more than 30 participants from Living Labs, companies, public officials, policy makers, researchers, non-profit organisations, and entrepreneurs.

During the workshop, the REWAISE Competency Groups met to discuss the highlighted relevant topics, pooling their vision and exploring new objectives and models to unify and implement the best methodology for co-creating Living Labs.

As one of five projects of the H2020 call SC5-04 “Smart Water Economy”, REWAISE links an extensive network of nine living labs addressing a variety of water sources, water users, raw materials, as well as nutrients, bioproduct and bioenergy recovery, and five main governance models (public company, delegated public management, direct private management, delegated private operation and concession) in five countries.