A social-media-based living lab: an incubator for human-centric software engineering and innovation

This paper investigates the integration of social media technologies and living lab concepts of open and user experiences-driven innovation, in order to align software engineering and innovation. The proposed social media-based living lab approach is aimed at fostering design thinking within a human experience-centric engineering and innovation approach. Living lab provides openness of collaboration among software engineers, stakeholders and potential end-users as well as the engagement of users as developers. We also show how living lab has been used to engage users and stakeholders in fundamental research and empirical software engineering including: (1) strengthening user and customer involvement in the overall software engineering lifecycle, and (2) combining social media and living into an integrative software engineering environment in which end-users and consumers are designers, developers and further more innovators.