Bloopers: Living Labs Report - Part 2: Typology of Living Labs

This is Part 2 in a series of posts after the publishing of 'Advancing University Living Labs: relational infrastructure for transformative impact', with some outtakes which didn't make the final report, but I still want to share.

You can read Part 1: Generations here.

Context

What are Living Labs? Simply put, they're platforms for change; bringing together people from across government, business, civil society, academia and more, to co-create ways to address the challenges of our time.

Find out more:

Living Lab origins, developments, and future perspectives

This booklet provides a comprehensive introduction to the origins, evolution, and future outlook of the Living Lab movement. It has been created to guide readers through the development of Living Labs over the years and highlight the path ahead. While earlier publications, such as the “ENoLL & Its Community” booklet from 2014, covered certain aspects of Living Labs, this publication is the first to focus solely on the full trajectory of the movement—from its roots to the dynamic, expanding ecosystem it represents today. In recent years, the ENoLL Members Catalogue has focused on showcasing the community aspect of Living Labs, but there has been no single, consolidated publication devoted to exploring the historical background and future ambitions of this ever- growing movement. Over the past decade, both Living Lab research and practice have thrived. Certain foundational principles have converged, creating a shared framework for the movement, while other aspects, such as specific application domains, have diversified, demonstrating the adaptability of Living Labs to a wide range of challenges and contexts. As deeply rooted entities within their respective environments, LivingLabs are inherently shaped by their unique surroundings and networks of stakeholders. This connection makes them responsive to change and, in many instances, powerful drivers of positive transformation. By fostering more sustainable and desirable futures, Living Labs play an active role in shaping the course of innovation, amplifying their impact and societal relevance. This booklet is envisioned as a living document, evolving in step with the Living Lab movement. Developed from existing research, documentation, and practical experiences, it provides a reflection on the history and policies that have supported Living Labs, a snapshot of the current landscape, and a forward-looking perspective on emerging opportunities and challenges. Regular updates and contributions are planned to ensure that this publication remains relevant and aligned with the latest advancements in the Living Lab community. As part of ENoLL’s communication materials, this booklet is intended for a broad audience. It aims to be a valuable resource for professionals, institutions, and individuals with an interest in open and user-centred innovation, innovation management, policy development, and social and territorial innovation. Whether the reader is a researcher, policy-maker, business leader, or simply someone with a passion for innovative solutions, this booklet is designed to inform, inspire, and offer guidance on the transformative impact of Living Labs.

Zenodo

Background

Living Labs come in many shapes and forms - making strategic choices about the type of living lab that is being developed is key to ensuring the clusters of capabilities, key partners to crowd in, geographic boundaries, process model, scale of resources needed and ongoing financial model are fit for purpose.

These are not meant to be mutually exclusive types, instead I aim to tease out different shapes of living labs with the intention to support more nuanced conversations early on, or at maturing transitions in the evolution of labs.

There have been various proposed Living Lab typologies, [1] [2] [3] [4] however, the diversity of forms of Living Labs and their associated practice is evolving at such a rate that I believe an updated typology is needed.

The following typology has been proposed to be accessible to people and organisations who may be less familiar with Living Labs yet are also convening, funding and partnering to tackle complex challenges. The typology is based on the case studies in the Monash University Advancing University Living Labs report [6] as well as research and engagement with Living Labs around the world. 

The typology spans technical and ‘complicated’ challenges (such as developing a decentralised energy system), complex challenges (such as achieving sustainable mobility for a town) and into ‘chaotic’ or unstable challenges (such as pandemic response), framed around the Cynefin sensemaking framework. [5]

Living Labs are categorised in this typology by their primary characteristics, whilst recognising that they may include elements of other types), thus presenting the landscape view with overlaps.

Living Labs are considered in this typology as intermediaries, hence the inclusion of the ‘systems shifting intermediaries’ functions. [7]

Example: a Challenge-led Living Lab focused on net zero emissions will have one or multiple places in which their activities are conducted - whilst these places are important to the lab’s challenge, they are enablers not the primary focus. Whereas, a Place-sourced lab focusing on a specific town or region may have net zero as a project or cluster of activity, but will likely look at connected challenges such as local economic development, health and wellbeing or local transport.

A landscape typology for Living Labs

The Living Lab Typology - Detail

Conclusion

This typology aims to bring some nuance to the discussion about how we orient, design and implement labs as responses to societal challenges.

We could look at this through the lens of Generations of Living Labs and understand that as the field has matured, orienting towards more complex challenges from the early roots of technical and complicated challenges has been a natural evolution.

Fundamentally, Labs which focus on technical challenges will operate and have quite different Capabilities, different resource needs, and different financial models for sustainability, from ones focused on complex challenges.

Nuancing our conversations about the kinds of Labs we're building and working on is an important part of better understanding different aspects of Living Lab (and Social Innovation Lab) research, education and practice.

As always - keen to hear your thoughts here or over on Linkedin, happy to be challenged, and keen to discuss!

Next Steps

The next post couple of posts will take a dive into the origins of different Labs, as well as a way to consider the maturity pathways for Labs to move from simple demonstrations to platforms for change over time, grounded in the likes of innovation ecosystems and transitions theory.

References

[1] Hossain, M., Leminen, S., & Westerlund, M. (2019). A systematic review of Living Lab literature. Journal of cleaner production, 213, 976-988.

[2] Schuurman, Dimitri & Mahr, Dominik & Marez, Lieven & Ballon, Pieter. (2013). A fourfold typology of Living Labs: an empirical investigation amongst the ENoLL community. ICE & IEEE-ITMC- ldots.

[3] Alavi, H. S., Lalanne, D., & Rogers, Y. (2020). The five strands of Living Lab: A literature study of the evolution of Living Lab concepts in HCI. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI), 27(2), 1-26.

[4] Leminen, S., Westerlund, M., & Nyström, A. G. (2012). Living labs as open-innovation networks.

[5] Snowden, D. (2005). Strategy in the context of uncertainty. Handbook of Business strategy, 6(1), 47-54.

[6] Rye, S., Donaldson, L., French, M., Jasieniak, J., & Raven, R. (2025). Advancing University Living Labs: Relational Infrastructure for Transformative Impact (Version 1). Monash University. https://doi.org/10.26180/30653942.v1

[7] Burkett, I. (2024) Governance in and for complexity: Part 1: collective governance within intermediary organisations. Good Shift. Accessed at: https://medium.com/good-shift/governance-in-and-for-complexity-eac108d8b589