A living laboratory for managing the front-end phase of innovation adoption: the case of RFID implementation

The recent interest in radio frequency identification (RFID) technologies offers an interesting opportunity for researchers to examine the different phases of the innovation process. Although this technology has improved substantially over the last few years, its adoption by the business community still raises some challenges and unanswered questions for both developers and potential users. This paper provides a detailed description of an actual innovative project to implement RFID. It also provides a strong argument for dedicated organisational settings in which open innovation project management can develop through a living lab. The advent of the living laboratory approach as an innovation platform characterised by 'users as innovators' cooperating in an open and neutral research environment has generated many theoretical and practical findings that have greatly enriched the literature on project fuzzy front-end (FFE). We propose a conceptual framework with four main dimensions that encompasses the complexity of this type of undertaking, in which project success is considered from the standpoint of both the developer and the adopter. This approach proved to be an efficient way to reduce fuzziness at the early project implementation stages.