Shaping digital earth applications through open innovation – setting the scene for a digital earth living lab

Abstract

Science and policy increasingly request for sustainable development and growth. Similarly, Digital Earth undergoes a paradigm shift to an open platform that actively supports user engagement. While the public becomes able to contribute new content, we recognize a gap in user-driven validation, feedback and requirements capture, and innovative application development. Rather than defining Digital Earth applications top down, we see a need for methods and tools that will help building applications bottom up and driven by community needs. These should include a technology toolbox of geospatial and environmental enablers, which allow to access functional building blocks and content in multiple ways, but – equally important – enable the collaboration within partially unknown stakeholder networks. The validation and testing in real-life scenarios will be a central requirement when approaching the Digital Earth 2020 goals, which were articulated recently. We particularly argue to follow a Living Lab approach for co-creation and awareness rising in relation to environmental and geospatial matters. We explain why and how such a Digital Earth Living Lab could lead to a sustainable approach for developing, deploying, and using Digital Earth applications and suggest a paradigm shift for Virtual Globes becoming forums for research and innovation.

Keywords:

• sustainable development
• open innovation
• stakeholder engagement
• living laboratories
• governance methodologies
• virtual globes

1. Introduction

As response to the economic crisis, science and policy around the world began to re-enforce the importance of user and market needs and requested tighter integration of Research and Development (R&D) with intended – but also more general – stakeholder networks. In Europe, for example, this approach manifested itself in the concepts of smart sustainable and inclusive growth, as part of the Europe 2020 Strategy (EC 2010a). Location has been widely recognized as an integral factor for developing long-requested multi-disciplinary applications for meeting the strategic goals (Craglia et al. 2012a), and Digital Earth (DE) has been set into context (Craglia et al. 2012b).

Before going into any detail, we should be aware of the brief overall scenery, as sketched in Figure 1. So far, policy is addressing the required needs from one angle; research from another; and users – here talking about the set of all potential stakeholders, especially the public and private citizen – are relatively disconnected from both. This picture might look equally discouraging as provocative at the first glance, but it helps us to identify the gap between all three components (policy, research, and users) as a required working area. We strongly believe that exactly this current gap provides us with an urgently required space for innovation, which could create economic growth as well as social benefit.

Figure 1. Introduction to the innovation space.

But, what might be the role of DE, and what is a DE application in the first place? According to Al Gore's initial vision, DE would be a knowledge store related to scientific and cultural information. DE applications would focus on knowledge discovery and access, mainly by navigating a Virtual Globe. However, recent paradigm shifts in respect to this vision (Annoni et al. 2011; Craglia et al. 2012b; Goodchild et al. 2012) recognize that there is more than one Virtual Globe, and users are getting more actively engaged by providing own data and observations. They have the choice between tools such as Google Earth (http://earth.google.com), NASA's World Wind (http://worldwind.arc.nasa.gov), Microsoft's Bing Maps (http://www.bing.com/maps), and Esri's ArcGIS Explorer (http://www.esri.com/software/arcgis/explorer). In this wider context, we – for the moment – consider DE applications as a pool of geospatial-inside software solutions, that is, a set of applications that rely on some kind of spatial-temporal data or processing. This notion will be revised later.

While the public becomes able to contribute with new content – for example, Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) (Goodchild 2007) – we still miss some of the ingredients for innovation, particularly in terms of user-contributed validation, reflections of desirable solutions and market needs, as well as application development. While VGI is certainly the low-hanging fruit – though it comes with own challenges and pitfalls – the real missing mechanism in getting DE applications accepted, used, and providing benefit is co-creation. In order to account for community dynamics and end user needs – rather than defining DE applications top down – we see an urgent need to put the methods and tools in place that will help to build applications bottom up, driven by community demands.

As DE applications are per se evolving from an ecosystem of infrastructures and platforms, there cannot be a single governance method to the challenge mentioned above. However, we might take a structured approach on investigating the overall research and innovation ecosystem, analyzing gaps when approaching the newly set DE vision for 2020 and related political and scientific goals, and suggesting an overall governance methodology. The article at hand presents exactly this. We particularly suggest a Living Lab approach for unleashing potentials of available resources for socio-economic benefit.

The remainder of this article is structured as follows. The basic political and scientific background to this work is given in the next section, together with the currently evolving notion of open innovation. The mentioned analysis of today's innovation ecosystems and arising possibilities relating to the application of Living Laboratories (Living Labs in short), is presented thereafter. This includes an overall framework for characterizing innovation facilities, as well as a generic governance methodology. On this basis, we apply the concept of open innovation and the Living Lab approach to the sustainable development of DE applications. Our investigations begin with a state of play analysis and then revisit the notion of DE applications and their evolvement. Finally, we suggest a Digital Earth Living Lab (DELI) as a way toward the DE 2020 vision and the political and scientific goals relating to social benefit and economic growth. In the subsequent discussion, we present a Strength, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threads (SWOT) analysis of the proposed approach and elaborate on possible future scenarios, just before drawing conclusions and defining new work items.

2. Background

The major incentive behind this work is sustainable development (WCED 1987). Recent international events – such as the 2009 Royal Society meeting on ‘The sustainable planet: opportunities and challenges for science, technology and society’ (http://royalsociety.org/sustainable-planet) and the 2012 Rio + 20 Conference on sustainable development (http://www.uncsd2012.org) – reviewed the role of new advances in science and technology to address the grand challenges of society in the context of climate change, supply of essential materials, food and energy, and new disease patterns (Howard and Chamberlain 2011; UNEP 2012).

In this context, the emerging field of sustainability science (Kates et al. 2001; Swart, Raskin, and Robinson 2004; Wiek et al. 2012) is paving the way to reconciling science, environmental policies, and society needs to support sustainable development. Sustainability science considers the interplay of social, economic, and environmental ecosystems, amongst other reasons in order to find novel ways for balancing benefits. It should be addressed by emphasizing a close collaboration and interrelation between relevant participants such as industry, academic institutions, and citizen from a holistic and integrative perspective (Reid et al. 2010).

2.1. Political context

In line with the above, the Europe 2020 strategy (EC 2010a), formulated by the European Commission (EC), also emphasizes a smart and sustainable growth by promoting a more resource efficient, greener, and more competitive economy. The EC identifies the Digital Agenda (EC 2010b) and Innovation Union (EC 2010c) as flagship initiatives and main drivers to address these challenges, where technological-intensive domains are crucial to develop innovative and sustainable applications. These examples underline the same central message: innovations in Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) and scientific advancements are common denominators to enable sustainability development, regardless of particular scientific disciplines.

This is complemented by social challenges or benefit areas, which are on European level reflected in the Horizon 2020 (EC 2011) – including the challenges of health, demographic change and well-being; smart, green and integrated transport; and climate action, resource efficiency, and raw materials –, as well as globally – at least for the geospatial community – by the Group on Earth Observation (GEO, http://www.earthobservations.org). GEO's Social Benefit Areas (SBAs), for example, include the improving the management of energy resources and the improving weather information, forecasting, and warning.

2.2. Science context

Within the scope of their ‘Grand Challenges in Global Sustainability Research’ analysis, also the International Council for Science (ICSU) has emphasized that the understanding and management of climate change, environmental degradation, and the quest for sustainable growth are among the most fundamental challenges facing today's society (ICSU 2010). An important driver toward sustainability science is the establishment of a multi-disciplinary, integrated, and collaborative approach. Amongst others, Hey and Trefethen (2005) proposed the use of research (cyber-)infrastructure to support the needs of multi-disciplinary collaborative research by sharing distributed resources – for example, datasets about air, land, and water or forecasting algorithms – among scientific teams. The integration and use of accurate, up-to-date data through cyber-infrastructures leverages efficient management, sharing, and exploitation of any kind of resources scattered among numerous agencies and institutions. The next generation of cyber-infrastructures should be able to manage the complexity of natural processes and environmental changes, so that scientists may understand and predict them accordingly (Shupeng and Van Genderen 2008). Some promising examples are EarthCube (http://earthcube.ning.com) of the National Science Foundation (NSF), GEO's Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS, http://www.earthobservations.org), and European Strategy Forum for Research Infrastructures (ESFRI, http://ec.europa.eu/research/esfri).

With our work, we urge for a ‘change to sustainability’ in the development of DE applications, which be able to adapt to new technologies; contribute to reduce costs; optimize their use; and create reliable cyber-infrastructures, community networks, and real-life experimentation facilities. Hence, we see user involvement as a major driver for successfully shaping the next generation of DE applications.

2.3. The concept of open innovation

The scenery outlined above has been complemented by a shift of paradigm in stakeholder engagement, that is, in the way people are involved in decision-making processes. Open innovation is the central concept. A particular organization develops an open innovation strategy when it is willing to interact with stakeholders outside the closed boundaries of the organization so as to use resources – for example, methods, ideas, knowledge, technologies – and exploit internal and external paths to market them (Chesbrough 2003). R&D is classically addressed ‘in-house’ – meaning that experiments are still commonly kept in closed laboratories and only final results are published and considering the usually restricted target audience (peers and experts from related research areas). Open innovation attempts to make underlying challenges, intermediate results, and even early stages of product or service development, visible to wider audiences; in some cases even to the public. The latter leads to open innovation crowdsourcing, where an impressive list of examples has been provided by Open Innovators (http://www.openinnovators.net/list-open-innovation-crowdsourcing-examples/).

In a nutshell, open innovation strategies put emphasis in the collaboration, participation, and direct communication and exchanges of views with external user and stakeholder during the entire life cycle development of a product or service. This fundamental aspect can be accomplished by a Living Lab approach. It can be thus seen as one means to distribute problem solving and challenges over an unlimited targeted audience, which can participate and submit ideas and solutions. For instance, United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recently launched challenges through an online website addressed to an open audience for getting solutions to particular environmental problems (Anastas 2012).

3. Analysis of innovation ecosystems and the living lab approach

Ultimately, we intend to reach the goals of sustainable development and growth. Keeping the above in mind, how may we – even independent of the DE context – approach or characterize innovation ecosystems and related governance? Which approaches might be valuable for closing the gap, which we called the ‘innovation space’ of (Figure 1)?

3.1. A Framework for characterizing innovation ecosystems

It is clear that open innovation strategies should involve a wide range of potential stakeholders in the design, development, and testing of a product or service. Ballon, Pierson, and Delaere (2005) proposed a conceptual framework for characterizing different types of innovation strategies. First, the takeoff of a product or service onto the market is mostly bound to the degree of maturity of the technology used. Second, the aim of the open innovation strategies may range from design and development to testing platforms. For instance, prototyping strategies are mostly focused on design and implementation aspects, whereas test beds are centered on testing and assessing products and services. Finally, the degree of openness refers to the level of ‘external participation’ as a product, as well as a service, and goes through its life cycle from its inception to the market. Extreme examples are closed teams such as in-house R&D group to open innovation participation such as crowd sourcing (Howe, 2006).

Figure 2 presents a revised version of this conceptual framework, where technology maturity and the degree of openness are on the horizontal axis, bottom and top respectively. We modified the initial graphic from Ballon, Pierson, and Delaere (2005) for illustrating what we believe is currently missing – or not matured enough – in order to seriously address the innovation space between science, policy, and all potential stakeholders. Accordingly, the figure underlines the current gap in technology transfer; it requests catalysts between R&D results and ready-to-use products in the marketplace.

Figure 2. Existing gap to leverage R&D results to market-ready products [typology of open innovation strategies modified from Ballon, Pierson, and Delaere (2005)].

This leaves us with two questions: (1) how might we govern the overall process and (2) who should we approach for the required catalysts? We elaborate on both in the remainder of this section, before projecting our findings to DE and its applications in section 4.

3.2. Generic governance methodology

We are looking for a governance methodology to establish well-defined methods to coordinate and interrelate involved participants. Figure 3 depicts such a generic governance methodology based on the Cyclic Innovation Model (CIM) (Berkhout 2000; Berkhout and van der Duin 2007) and on the results of the European-funded Apollon project (http://www.apollon-pilot.eu). The extended CIM is reflected in the product development part of Figure 3 (bottom). The combination of design-develop-testing phases is accompanied by a scanning of the environment (not represented in Figure 3) that is meant for enabling product launch to the market once the appropriate level of maturity is reached. As the authors highlight, the most important feature of CIM is that the different phases toward innovation are not one-directional but cyclic: innovations build on innovations (feedback), ideas create new concepts, successes create new challenges, and failures create new insights.

Figure 3. Overall methodology to enable customer-driven product development (adapted from Apollon project).

The Apollon project particularly suggests extending the CIM methodology to support a governance model for the creation of user-driven innovation networks. Accordingly, the methodology complements product (and service) development (bottom Figure 3) with the stakeholders consolidation (top Figure 3). The latter consists of four phases:

1. Connect: This phase concerns the setup of a network of participant stakeholders, as well as the initial definition of a collaboration infrastructure in terms of required resources, scope, and impact of the project; trying to answer the following questions: Do we prefer to engage a lot of people, even without knowledge or expertise in a particular theme, or a smaller, more selective team? Do we find incremental or disruptive ideas? Do we want to establish a trusted network of partners or just to attract people interested in such themes?

2. Plan and Engage: It defines the collaboration agreement in terms of managing Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs); roles; formal agreements among the involved stakeholders; as well as the initial collection of ideas, requirements, and definition of use cases. Some questions in this phase are the following: Who plays the role of coordinator? Who acts as facilitator? How information and conversions are channeled through the network of stakeholders?

3. Support and Govern: It refers to the supporting tools required to begin and support the product (or service) development cycle (bottom part of Figure 3) from the initial requirements and use cases defined in the planning and engagement phase. As each open innovation program may potentially be targeted to any type of product and involve different kinds of stakeholders, the supporting tools, services, and infrastructure to govern and carry out the product development phases may be distinct in each case. Definition of milestones and assurance of active communication among stakeholders are common tasks of this phase.

4. Manage and Track: It consists of assessing the expected impact and expectations of the outcomes of the development cycle, according to the initial goals and scope specified in the planning and engagement phase and updated through successive iterations in the product development cycle. This also includes possibly required training and the dissemination of results of the completed iteration.

The aim of the generic governance methodology is to put stakeholders and technical staff working together from the early stages of a product or service. In principle, this methodology can be deployed at all stages of the innovation ecosystem framework introduced above (Figure 2), that is, to realize prototypes, test beds, as well as market and social pilots. In respect to the goal of our work, we will particularly focus on the use of this methodology for approaching the required catalyst between less mature and closed developments and open markets (see also Section 2.3).

3.3. An introduction to living laboratories

Ballon, Pierson, and Delaere (2005) already suggest a possible mechanism for implementing the required facilitator for open innovation and co-creation: Living Labs. Over the last decade this concept has been promoted as one promising way to address the above challenges, that is, transforming available inputs (prototype software components and various technology or design focused testing facilities) with the desired outcome (mature and innovative products with strong market take up). They incorporate the requested catalyst and also – at least in parts – social and market pilots.

The term ‘Living Lab’ as such is difficult to define (Ballon, Pierson, and Delaere 2005; Bergvall-Kåreborn and Ståhlbröst 2009; Levén and Holmström 2012). The main defining characteristics may be summarized as follows:

1. A Living Lab enables conducting experiments in familiar and real-world contexts. Experimental settings resemble as closely as possible real-life situations and embrace the uncontrollable dynamics of everyday life. If you plan to introduce a next generation mobile device, for example, give it to people on the street.

2. A Living Lab provides an experimentation environment for co-creation in close collaboration with (end) users. This means that users openly and actively participate in all stages of a product development (e.g. ideas, design, development, testing), and not only in last phases. For example, ask users for their impressions and suggestions for the user interface of your new mobile device.

3. Opposed to (fully-open) crowd sourcing (Howe 2006), a Living Lab follows an open innovation strategy where there are restrictions on the targeted participating audience. For example, give a few dozens or hundreds of your mobile devices to selected people.

4. A Living lab can be seen as an open innovation ecosystem. By promoting co-creation, community dynamics, and real life contexts, innovation processes may emerge to create new opportunities and capture unique ideas from a set of stakeholders who have valuable knowledge for shaping specific problems, and social and technological needs. New generations (teenagers) have certainly different desires than elderly people – not only considering mobile devices.

The European Network of Living Labs (ENoLL, http://www.openlivinglabs.eu) provides many more details about the overall concept and hosts searchable contact information for more than 300 Living Labs within Europe, China, and Africa. Details about possible, more specific governance models for Living Labs are illustratively described in (MEDLAB 2011).

While all the above findings can be equally applied to DE as to any other domain, we will in the next section further elaborate on the specific of DE applications and eventually required adaptations when applying the Living Lab approach in this context. In relation to existing investigations on governance for DE – as for example developed in the context of EarthCube (http://earthcube.ning.com/group/governance) – we seek a common governance methodology that allows us (1) to trigger innovation for DE applications and (2) to interconnect Living Labs using the DE capabilities.

4. Open innovation for digital earth applications

In this section, we customize the notion of Living Labs to the DE context, including a potential methodology for realizing a DE Living Lab in order to address sustainable development and growth, that is, to boost socio-economic benefit, in relation to DE applications. We promote this approach for implementing the catalyst requested above, particularly for closing the gap in user-contributed validation, reflections of desirable solutions and market needs, as well as development of innovative DE applications. Potential examples are included for illustration.

4.1. Current situation–available inputs

Over the years, a large set of existing components for implementing DE applications emerged from test beds – such as OGC Web Services (OWS) or GEO/GEOSS Application Integration Pilots (AIPs) – or from prototypes, which have been developed by research projects, for example, under the funding of NSF or the EC. As a prominent example, the NSF EarthCube programme aims to develop a user community–guided cyber-infrastructure to integrate geospatial data across specialties on earth systems and foster collaboration between these (science) communities. Under the EC's FI-PPP (Future Internet Public-Private Partnership, http://www.fi-ppp.eu) Programme, several on-going research projects are pursuing to build a series of enablers for multiple usage areas – including environment (Havlik et al. 2011) – with a strong commitment on stakeholder engagement and innovation. As another example, the EU-funded EuroGEOSS project has contributed to the GEOSS Common Infrastructure (GCI) with concrete and valuable operational components in support of technology test beds, GEOSS AIP, or even development of cross-thematic environmental applications (Vaccari et al. 2012). In the context of the INSPIRE Directive (EC 2007), harmonized data models (INSPIRE Data Specifications) have been tested by the community, and prototypes for assessing INSPIRE Networking Services and supporting tools have been developed. Both can be seen as initial inputs for a Re-usable INSPIRE Reference Platform (http://ec.europa.eu/isa/actions/01-trusted-information-exchange/1–17action_en.htm). Together with many others, all those components provide data and service specifications; reference models; software tools together with patterns and guidelines of using them; and existing test facilities, platforms, and technical infrastructures.

These building blocks are complemented by an increasing number of Virtual Globes, as well as increasing capabilities for geo-social networking, starting with geo-coding and geo-tagging mechanisms. All in all it can be summarized as ‘toolboxes’ or enablers, which ensure a technology push toward DE applications. They enable several types of important user interactions, including personalization, community building, content creation and sharing, and a rich set of user experience components.

4.2. Digital Earth applications re-visited – identifying desired outputs/results

Before we can seriously address the governance question for the sustainable development of DE applications, we should re-define what constitutes a DE application. In other words, we should examine the application pull, which opposes the above mentioned push of technologies. History has told us that the release of new technical components does not necessarily imply take up. Instead, success usually grounds in the right balance between user demands and offered products.

Instead of looking into the available applications of today, or expanding all possible ways of applying the available tool box(es), we suggest addressing this issue bottom up by establishing methods that identify desired DE products. Those will then determine the requirements toward the toolbox of DE components, or (environmental and geospatial) enablers, as we called them above. This approach adds a new scientific dimension, by lifting classical user requirements analysis into areas such as community dynamics, behavioral sciences, and the analysis of stakeholder networks (Chesbrough 2010). Underlying research questions include, for example, what are possible value chains, how does the behavior of individuals and societies change by introducing a new product, and which business models can be successful? Once the user community needs have been clarified, we start investigating approaches for realizing this and at the same time improving available components for implementation (see Section 4.3).

Overall, we should be able to distinguish what qualifies any given application in order to be a DE application. Initially, we will require some form of spatial-temporal characteristic, that is, involving information resources that have some form of location information related to them or offering any form of geospatial processing functionality. Additionally, we require some capability for visualization on a Virtual Globe. This second condition is introduced in order to keep focus and to distinguish any ‘geospatial-inside’ software from a real DE application.

Again, it should be stressed that whereas we have only one planet earth, there are – and always will be – multiple Virtual Globes available, all allowing for diverse (user) perspectives (Craglia et al. 2012b). Still, diverging from Al Gore's initial vision of a DE – in the end – Virtual Globes will only provide the background layers and the environment of offering value added services for collaboration, in the sense of a Platform as a Service (Raines and Pizette 2010). It is the dependency on the responding users, which will define the success and evolvement of a DE application.

Some tools are already available today. Nevertheless, we could dramatically boost stakeholder uptake, mainly because DE application development still requires complex development skills and is neither intuitive nor easy accessible to layman. The Eye on Earth platform (http://watch.eyeonearth.org) provides a good example. The system follows a sophisticated concept in making environmental information not only available to users, but also to provide additional information and to extend the platform if desired. Eye on Earth is running and expanding in scope. Still, development efforts and private contributions are done by a few individuals without a large external driving force. The full potential might be unleashed by introducing an according governance methodology and open community.

In following the above, Virtual Globes will in the end not be the DE application in itself, but become forums for collaborative DE application development (Schade, Maué, and Davis 2010). These globes will have to offer lightweight and easy development tools, similar to citySDK (http://www.forumvirium.fi/en/project-areas/smart-city/citysdk) in the context of smart cities or the goals of the SATIN project (http://www.satinproject.eu/team) on easy app development for mobile end devices. Underlying innovation processes should be supported by incubators for showcasing new developments, also with marketplaces – or a single marketplace, which is shared across Virtual Globes – for operational products.

4.3. DELI as a way forward

As a direct consequence of the discussions on open innovation and Living Labs, we suggest to apply the Living Lab approach to the development of DE applications, which we call DELI. DELI complements the virtual/digital world with grounding in the reality, that is, linking back to regions on planet earth in which the social and economic benefits of DE applications can be tested and exploited. These regions might, for example, be cities or rural areas – both of varying size – and might cross administrative borders. Notably, this also includes the possibility for ‘virtual’ laboratories, that is, laboratories, which exchange content without direct physical interaction, but being still grounded in (probably distributed) regions on the globe.

In order to account for community dynamics and real end-user needs, a sound and flexible methodology is required to help us to shape a sustainable and open innovation ecosystem to materialize DELI. As the methodology of choice, we decided to follow the governance methodology outlined above (Section 3.2). Before applying this methodology, we now investigate the adaptations that are required for DELI.

4.3.1. Connect in DELI

The initial seed for a DE application is the intended scope, resources, and motivation. The starting context is accompanied with a scanning of the current state-of-the-art, searching specially for related prototypes and test beds – for example, the Re-usable INSPIRE Reference Platform, GEO GCI, the EarthCube cyber-infrastructure, and results from R&D projects – and so on which may be potentially inputs for DELI.

Initial conversations and contacts are primary to establish a network of interested stakeholders around the initial motivation and intended objective of DELI. This might be realized using direct contacts to known stakeholders, also via existing (online) communities and hands-on events, in which the intended process is demonstrated with practical cases, for example as part of public events, such as the recent Big Data / Changing Place exhibition at the National Library of New Zealand. A kind of advisory board might participate from the beginning, seen as key actors coming from related government organizations – including National Government Organizations (NGOs) –, big industrial players, Small and Medium Enterprises, standardization bodies, and enthusiastic citizen. Criteria for delimiting the initial set of stakeholders depend on envisioned individual DE applications and are mostly determined by the scope and the sought impact in terms of either incremental or disruptive innovation. One promising research focus could be the combination of Open Government Data (Perego et al. 2012) with VGI (De Longueville et al. 2010).

4.3.2. Plan and engage in DELI

Having initiated first contacts to potential stakeholders, the next step goes further, to engage and consolidate a trusted network of stakeholders. This means to explicitly define the collaboration agreement – for example, IPR management, formal agreements, and liaisons – among the involved participants and the definition of project roles and basic collaboration tools, such as mailing lists and wiki sites, and also Virtual Globes and geo-social networks. The ultimate goal is to make clear communication protocols and information channels to enable open, timely, and fluid conversations between the stakeholder network and the ICT staff and developers of DE applications, so as to form a trusted community. The required sense of an influential community might, for example, be established launching competitions, similar to this year's Green ICT application challenge of the International Telecommunication Union (http://www.itu.int/ITU-T/climatechange/greenict/index.html). The long- or medium-term perspective should be illustrated at the same time.

One of the first commitments of the trusted community is the elaboration of a plan by collecting ideas, requirements, and agreement on common and representative use cases, based on the initial scope and motivation defined in the earlier phase. This pursues gathering opportunities and trends as well as needs that the trusted community would require in the future DE application. This implies, for instance, to start from existing developments in the target themes of desired DE applications – such as GEO GCI as a reference model, observations available from Eye on Earth, INSPIRE data-sets and services, etc. – intertwined with community discussions (e.g. stakeholder workshops) toward the identification of target markets and sustainable best practices for further developing phases.

4.3.3. Support and govern in DELI

This step is likely the most critical part in DELI because it is aimed to smoothly fit the stakeholder network together with the DE application development itself. That is, stakeholders actively participate to turn a traditional product development process into a co-design, co-development, and co-testing process in which unique, innovative ideas may naturally arise. These creation processes should be thought of as incremental iterations toward marketable DE applications. Testing conducted in real-world situations – beginning in local and regional settings and to scale to cross-border scenarios if required – should lead to new ideas, needs, and emerging technologies, which become valuable feedback for design and development processes. As the DE application gets closer to a market-ready product, potential industry should be attracted, for instance, as observers as part of the stakeholders networks. This might be facilitated by presenting demonstrations and statistical summaries of experiment results and illustrating the use of the developed products on a virtual globe – dynamically and in real time.

The realization of co-operative design, development, and testing processes require supporting infrastructures and platforms (Zheng et al. 2011), which especially should include research infrastructures, such as those spearing from ESFRI, as detailed in Section 2.2, and infrastructures for collaboration. In the particular case of DE applications, the connection to research infrastructures might be ensured via the International Society for Digital Earth (ISDE) or by a complementing body such as the suggested European or even International Digital Earth research Network (EDEN or IDEN, respectively) (Annoni et al. 2011). Virtual Globes have to be equipped with collaboration tools – for example, access to environmental and geospatial toolboxes via standardized software development kits, incubators for community generated DE applications, access to a shared marketplace, or geo-social networking capabilities. Still, the scientific aspects clearly miss competences from the behavioral science on user dynamics. Application design and serious gaming should become closely connected in the loop.

4.3.4. Manage and track in DELI

The promotion to the market is subject to an assessment of the expected impacts and expectations of the DE applications. Responsible management and steering committees might be defined out of the existing ISDE, become an additional role of the suggested IDEN, or be newly set up. It might also make sense to establish a network of regional bodies in order to more particularly account for location-dependent markets and cultures.

In any case, decision-making processes must be transparent to keep the stakeholder community informed of the impact results. Again, dynamic and real-time statistics that are presented on a Virtual Globe might provide a powerful tool. Indeed, such results may become the seed for new DE applications, starting again the connect phase in DELI. This will certainly benefit from and improve with each iteration of the cyclic governance methodology as introduced in Section 3.

4.3.5. Summary of the extended CIM in DELI

(Figure 4) summarizes the resulting situation, in which currently available inputs – research prototypes, results from field trials, and technical components out of test beds (lower-left part of the figure) – serve as the seeds for co-design, co-development and co-testing following the extended CIM within DELI (lower-central part). Outputs of DELI are illustrated toward the lower-right; those should be matured DE applications close to market release. The increased opening of not only the product but also the co-creation processes is illustrated on the top part of the illustration. Increasing amounts of stakeholders (illustrated by a cloud of terms on the top of the figure) become involved with each iteration. Talking about Virtual Globes in this context, they could be overlaid with the central part of the figure, as the platforms/forums facilitating the co-creation processes and governance for DE as a whole. We omitted this additional graphic element in order to not overload the figure.

Figure 4. Open innovation with DELI.

5. Discussion

Having so far only introduced the overall concepts, we now concretize the possible shaping of DELI and future DE applications. We first provide a SWOT analysis (McKeown 2012), in order to foresee the intended role of Living Lab(s) in particular and open innovation ecosystems in general in creating next-generation DE applications. This is followed by several sketches of potential future scenarios of DELI taking shape and creating impact.

5.1. SWOT analysis of DELI

A DELI-focused SWOT analysis – that is, acknowledging general characteristics of the Living Lab approach, but projecting them particularly on DE applications – reveals the following:

Strength:

• Direct involvement of DE stakeholders, including citizen, in the design, development, and testing of DE applications.

• Quick to respond to changing expectations on and needs of DE applications.

• High probability of addressing social or economic benefit by DE applications.

• Ability to factor local and regional specifics in DE applications.

• Capacity to scale from local to regional settings or cross-border scenarios.

Weaknesses:

• Missing expertise in current DE application development, particularly on carrying research into innovation.

• Compared to conventional DE application production, considerably more effort required for continuous user engagement and monitoring.

• High entry barriers to Virtual Globes and associated tools, great skills required.

• Currently no harmonized governance methodology for realizing DELI.

Opportunities:

• Bringing DE applications (improved version of current prototypes and newly emerging ideas) to targeted market.

• Expanding DE applications into new markets (e.g. smart cities) or thematic markets (e.g. health, demographics).

• Creating a DE applications market on its own (to gain visibility).

• Creating growth by sustainable DE application production.

• Promoting current (geospatial) information infrastructures and, more generally, research infrastructures, a foundation for wider multipurpose platforms for science-stakeholder collaboration.

Threads:

• Lack of training, education, or even culture of open innovation.

• Losing control of DE application production.

• Proficient handling of IPR and branding of created DE products.

• Marketing of DE applications in real-life scenarios.

• Cost of developing common methodology and applying it at diverse experimentation sites.

This analysis reveals several central aspects, particularly the need to leverage training, education, and enterprise mindset toward open innovation. We certainly will require a cultural shift in the attitude of tool providers and of numerous other stakeholders. The required resources for carrying this still have to be identified and freed. The same applies for the required controlling (or better channeling bodies). Clear mechanisms for ensuring IPR and security have to be put into place in order to enable DELI as a whole.

5.2. Envisioned future scenarios

A logical next step after completing the SWOT analysis would be the establishment of an action plan for implementing and maintaining DELI. However, due to the novelty of the concept and further required elaborations, we first see the need to depict possible scenarios to which DELI could lead us. How might these change DE applications and the use of Virtual Globes in the (near) future? We depict possible answers below. Each of the following six paragraphs sketches one possible scenario, with increasing level of sophistication and effort required.

Do nothing scenario

If we continue in the common way, drastically speaking, we will end up in a setting of scattered Virtual Globes, diverse and disconnected tool boxes – that is, environmental and geospatial data and services, together with prototypes and detached operational applications – and diverse marketplaces, facing the risk of losing identity and the branding of DE applications. To this end, users will be disconnected and confused and we fail reaching sustainable development.

DELI as a single laboratory

History should tell us that, trying to realize the proposed approach in a monolithic system, that is, on one Virtual Globe – say Bing Maps – and trying to connect available inputs in a single prescribed manner – that is, offering off the shelf deployment mechanisms of toolboxes and DE applications on Bing Maps only – will eventually fail. One accompanying big Living Lab – grounding Bing Maps in reality – would face issues of scaling local and regional trials to worldwide coverage. Furthermore, we would miss opportunities for widening perspectives for approaching the revised DE vision due to lack of alternatives.

DELI as a network of (thematic) Living Labs

Scaling and cross-border scenarios could be reached by connecting –that is, networking – Living Labs, which work on similar themes – such as the impacts of climate change, environmental impacts on health, etc. –and are located at different places across the globe. However, as we should have learned from the past, such approaches result in silos. In other words, this solution might end up in de-coupled thematic clusters of DE applications on one of more Virtual Globes – e.g. Bing Maps for climate change, Google Earth for smart transport, and NASA world wind for eco-energy and well-being. By neglecting that thematic areas are usually dependent from each other, this completely contradicts the growing request for multi-disciplinary approaches.

DELI as a network of (transversal) Living Labs

Networking transversal Living Labs – that is, those which do not focus on a particular theme, but primarily on enabling experimentation facilities and collaboration enablers – is certainly an approach for addressing the concerns of above and could also lead to interconnected Virtual Globes or portable DE applications. For example, Living Labs around the globe might support the cyclic governance method for DE application development on Bing Maps, Google Earth, and NASA World Wind. This might include approaches for common incubators for demonstrating and co-creating applications and entry points to a shared marketplace. However, a purely transversal solution is impossible to succeed due to missing focus and – more importantly – application needs. Missing local expertise and data on, for example, climate change and the related environmental, social, and economic phenomena will obviously block any serious testing of DE applications on climate action.

DELI as a network of thematic and transversal Living Labs

A combination of the last two scenarios, might get close to a successful innovation ecosystem in the DE context. Applications for related themes could be tested as diverse places across the entire globe, and the overall management could be harmonized leading to comparable results. However, this would still miss easy connectors to the current situation (see also Section 4.3.1 for available inputs) and to possible developments of the future. Focusing on the Living Lab only, we might neglect required and important testing of toolboxes on a more technical level, activities such as OGC OWS, GEO AIPs or the testing of the INSPIRE Data Specifications, would not be supported per se, due to the Living Lab focus.

DELI as networked experimentation sites

In an ideal and equally realistic setting, instead of considering DELI as a Living Lab in isolation, it becomes well integrated into other testing and experimentation approaches and the implementing facilities. New ideas, prototypes, and DE application products will undergo a life cycle covering the complete ecosystem framework (Figure 2). For example, INSPIRE Data Specification testing can happen in test beds, prototypes on INSPIRE Networking Services can be established, and the result of both together might be fed into a Living Lab context, which stimulates innovation based on solid scientific, political, and technical grounds, and thereby facilitate at least Europe-wide implementation and maintenance of INSPIRE (Schade and Granell 2012). Only such a situation can fully implement the catalyst requested in Section 3 and thereby help to leverage the potential socio-economic benefits of the innovation space as introduced in the first section of this article.

6. Conclusions and future work

In this paper, we – for the first time – connect the concept of DE and Living Labs. We did so, because of (1) the overall need for sustainable development and growth; (2) the identified high potential of the innovation space between science – policy and users; (3) and the integrative nature of geospatial information. We particularly highlighted the potential for sustainable DE application development and sketched possibilities to adapt existing building blocks, including methodologies, enabling toolboxes, and research infrastructures, as enablers for establishing a DELI. DELI would ground the virtual world of DE to facilitate co-creation, validation, and testing, and thereby fostering open innovation for future generations of DE applications. Socio-economic benefit has been defined as the central goal.

The scenery presented in this paper will be the seed for a series of related activities. As a subsequent step, we will elaborate on the required action plan for realizing DELI. The accompanying governance framework – following a cyclic methodology – will be a driving factor.