The Innovation City project we presented at ICT2008 illustrates the development and implementation of a technical and methodological demonstrator for co-design and user community evaluation of emerging ideas, concepts and ICT artefacts that are leading to new innovative products and services. This is not only about ICT technical innovation as social, organisational and societal innovations are the most important aspects to be observed in term of potential adoption by users. This development takes place within the LEVIER Living Lab which belongs to the Media & Networks Competitiveness Cluster (French Brittany and Pays de la Loire regions).

 This demonstrator/platform could be used by regions, cities and territories as a way to involve citizens, at the earlier stage of any project, within the ideas and concepts discussion and for the evaluation before anything is physically produced or implemented. It could be used also by other Living Labs as an operational methodology, process and infrastructure to complete the cycle of exploration, experimentation and evaluation leading to the conceptualization and co-design of innovative products and services within a collaborative Living Lab approach. The approach presented with iCity is aimed at any type of situations, either public or business driven and any type of product and service. The originality of this platform is to involve user communities early in the process of R&D (Front-End Innovation), as part of a multidisciplinary scientific approach to explore experiment and evaluate ideas and original concepts as well as innovative ICT artefacts that will be implemented in future products and services. All the stakeholders of the innovation process (public bodies, private companies, research laboratories, user’s communities) will explore experiment and evaluate emerging ideas and concepts without having to develop any physical prototype or produce any physical part and implement them.

This platform also aims to bring together major players of 3D real-time and web3D in French Brittany and Pays de la Loire regions to form a powerful support for innovation.