nological innovation such as design. In 2011, it established a Design Leadership Board, whose report Design for Growth and Prosperity (Thomson & Koskinen, 2012) includes recommendations aimed at enhancing design's "long-term contribution to smart, sustainable, and inclusive growth through increased competitiveness and the pursuit of a better quality of life". The report presents design as a driver of innovation, defining it as "an activity of people-centred innovation by which desirable and usable products are defined and delivered". By bringing the end user closer to the innovation process, the report argues, the risk of launching new products and services may be reduced.
Design for all, also known as universal design in North America, is a branch of design that takes human diversity into account so that anyone, no matter what their personal characteristics and including future generations, can access goods, services, and environments and hence can participate fully in society (Aragall and Montaña, 2012). Although technology brings new possibilities, it can be a barrier as well as a facilitator (Steinfeld and Maisel, 2012); design for all seeks to ensure that technological innovation is tied to social progress, as suggested by design-for-all professional Rafael Montes in an interview cited in the Design for All Foundation Awards brochure (Design for All Foundation, 2013).
Design for all emphasizes the importance of involving users in the design process, because this means the end result is more likely to meet their needs. This view has traditionally put the discipline at odds with the "lone genius" stereotype of the designer; however, as Design for Growth and Prosperity suggests, this model is becoming increasingly discredited, as "the complexities of innovation call for a truly multidisciplinary approach" that involves users at all stages. Although many designers adopt a design-for-all approach as a matter of principle, successes such as the OXO product range imply that it has a role in bringing successful innovations to market (Aragall and Montaña, 2012; Steinfeld and Maisel, 2012). Steinfeld and Maisel suggest that universal design can help companies bridge the gap between innovations brought about by research, such as the synthesis of a new material, to a successful product launch through a holistic development approach that focuses on the end user; this point is also illustrated in IDeALL experiment with the company Lékué, as discussed below.
The emergence of living labs has provided a mechanism for precisely this kind of multidisciplinary, co-creative approach, allowing companies to test products with users and public bodies to try new ways of providing services. Living labs allow design for all to make the logical step from user-centred design to user-driven design. Living labs generate not only new methodologies but also help to organize complex communities (e.g., including universities, local authorities, companies, and citizens) in co-designing solutions for complex problems. In that sense, living labs allow the design professionals to work with a co-design perspective, thereby enabling a more strategic approach that goes beyond the traditional client-by-client model. As Mulder (2012) and others suggest, by providing a real-life environment for the co-creation and evaluation of innovations, living labs allow complex problems to be identified and they enable the devlopment of solutions that will ultimately be more acceptable to a range of end users. Furthermore, thanks to new technologies and manufacturing methods, more channels for co-creation and evaluation have been made possible, as many commentators have noted, including the European Design Leadership Board in Design for Growth and Prosperity. However, the ability of living labs to facilitate user-driven design has not yet been fully embraced by small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), which make up 99% of businesses in the European Union (European Commission, 2013), or by public bodies who may be intrigued by Government 2.0 but are wary of the risks inv