Internationally Distributed Living Labs and Digital Ecosystems for Fostering Local Innovations in Everyday Life

There are an increasing number of information sources and services around us enabling new ways of interacting with our everyday environment. Examples include intelligent devices, sensors embedded in the environment and the emerging Internet-of-Things. Simultaneously users are becoming increasingly involved as information providers and consumers by means of Web 2.0 and social media. While these areas have gained a lot of attention recently and while the research on Digital Ecosystems has also dealt with these phenomena separately there seems to be need for research on the rich and complex ecosystem combining the sensor-based information sources with Web 2.0 and mobile services. In this paper, we propose a Digital Ecosystem architecture, which combines the social media and Internet-of-Things. The architecture is the fruit from the international collaboration between two long-term university Living Lab projects in Finland and in China. It aims at fostering student innovations in their everyday campus lives. We discuss the experiences learnt in the context of this international collaboration and the implications to Digital Ecosystem research.