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Innovate together

In many Research and Innovation projects (including Horizon Europe ones), the business dimension is most often articulated through desk-based planning: partners construct value chains, adoption pathways and impact models as structured projections of how the innovation is expected to function.

While this approach is methodologically convenient, it tends to treat uncertainty as something manageable through increased specification. Complex socio-technical dynamics are stabilised into linear sequences; interdependencies are reduced to lists of actors; behavioural variability is formalised into roles and functions.

As a result, the emerging model gains internal coherence at the expense of empirical grounding. Key questions: how organisations actually behave, how stakeholders negotiate competing incentives, how value moves through real contexts remain hidden behind representations that are logically precise but ontologically thin.

Imagine a co-creation space where ideas are explored in the everyday settings, interactions and stakeholder relationships that determine whether they will succeed. A space where researchers, designers, organisations and users meet to work through emerging concepts together; where value chains can be sketched on a wall and immediately confronted with operational realities; where assumptions are not buried in documents but articulated openly and tested precisely.

Imagine this space supporting your R&I project: connecting the technology you develop with real-world settings and helping you recognise what is viable, desirable, feasible and sustainable long before the technology is mature enough for large-scale deployment.

This mode of working: co-creative, contextual and iterative, is increasingly acknowledged across the European research landscape as a credible and effective way to ground innovation pathways in evidence, relevance and lived experience.

This is what living labs make possible: a way to innovate together, with the people and systems your ideas will ultimately touch.

Sustainable Business Design Living Lab

To bring this way of working into Research and Innovation projects, we use Sustainable Business Design Living Labs - structured environments that make this form of co-creation possible in practice. A Sustainable Business Design Living Lab is a real-context co-creation environment where organisations, researchers and stakeholders explore, design and refine innovations together. It brings human-centric design, systems analysis, business design and sustainable business design into a structured, iterative process that clarifies whether an emerging idea has the potential to create meaningful value for people, organisations and the wider system.

These Living Labs do not validate technologies. Instead, they use design processes - framing, prototyping, testing and iteration - to examine the strategic and systemic conditions under which an innovation could succeed. At early TRLs, this means exploring the coherence of the problem–solution fit, value-proposition logic and initial business-model hypotheses. As concepts mature, the Living Lab examines how alternative business models, sustainable value-chain configurations and socio-technical conditions shape viability, desirability, ecological responsibility and long-term resilience.

In practice, a Sustainable Business Design Living Lab enables partners to co-create value propositions, test emerging business-models, prototype future value chains, uncover system dependencies, explore circular or regenerative pathways and refine organisational assumptions through iterative learning cycles. This process reduces uncertainty, prevents misaligned development efforts and supports innovations that are coherent, responsible and future-ready.

CHARACTERISTICS OF A LIVING LAB

The 5 Elements constituting the living labs

Although Living Labs take many forms across Europe, their methodological foundation is well established. The European Network of Living Labs (ENoLL) has served as the primary European reference point for Living Lab methodology since 2006, and its framework is widely recognised across EU research and innovation programmes. They identify several defining characteristics that distinguish Living Labs from conventional research and planning approaches. Reinterpreted through a Sustainable Business Design perspective, these characteristics become the backbone of our Living Lab environments:

Active user involvement - direct participation of end users whose lived experiences, routines and needs inform the evolution of the innovation.
Users are not passive informants but engaged contributors whose insights help surface real constraints and opportunities.
Real-life setting - exploring and developing innovations in the environments where they will ultimately operate - workflows, organisations, communities, value chains.
Real-world contexts reveal system dynamics, behavioural patterns and constraints that cannot be captured through abstract planning.
Multi-stakeholder participation - Inclusion of all relevant actors: users, researchers, enterprises, public bodies, intermediaries who collectively shape the socio-technical landscape.
Their perspectives make visible interdependencies and tensions that influence feasibility and long-term value.
Multi-method approach - use of diverse and complementary methods - qualitative inquiry, systems mapping, design prototyping, quantitative analysis, contextual observation, scenario work - to build a multidimensional understanding of the innovation context.
Co-creation through iterative cycles - innovation develops through repeated rounds of framing, exploration, testing and refinement conducted with different groups of participants.
Iteration allows assumptions to be challenged early, insights to mature gradually, and solutions to align with real-world conditions.

WHEN TO USE A SUSTAINABLE BUSINESS DESIGN LIVING LAB

A Sustainable Business Design Living Lab is not required for every project.
It becomes valuable in contexts where uncertainty, complexity or multi-actor coordination make conventional planning insufficient.
It is most useful when teams need to understand how innovation behaves in real-world conditions before major strategic, organisational or technological commitments are made.

You should consider using a Sustainable Business Design Living Lab when:

1. Multiple actors influence adoption, feasibility or impact

When users, providers, organisations, regulators and intermediaries must all align for an innovation to succeed, the Living Lab helps surface interdependencies, tensions and shared opportunities early.

2. The innovation intersects with complex socio-technical systems

If your solution affects workflows, behaviours, decision processes, value chains or regulatory environments, the Living Lab provides a structured way to explore these dynamics in real contexts.

3. Business models and value chains are uncertain or emerging

When teams need to clarify value creation, distribution and capture - or test alternative business-model and sustainable value-chain logics - the Living Lab enables early prototyping and exploration before investments harden assumptions.

4. Sustainability or circularity dimensions require real-world grounding

If ecological responsibility, resource flows or regenerative practices are central to the project, the Living Lab helps examine how such principles play out across actual organisations and systems.

5. There is a risk of misalignment between technological development and real needs

Whenever technology development moves faster than understanding of users, organisations or system contexts, the Living Lab reconnects concept and context, preventing later friction.

6. Early insight can prevent unnecessary development loops or strategic drift

The Living Lab is especially helpful when early-stage evidence could redirect or refine the project, reducing uncertainty and ensuring resources focus on the most promising pathways.

7. The project intends to demonstrate human-centricity, relevance and feasibility to evaluators

Living Labs provide credible, EU-recognised proof that innovation has been explored with the people, organisations and systems it aims to affect - a strength in Horizon Europe evaluations.

Living Lab In A Technology Company

In a mid-sized technology company, we designed and operated a Living Lab: a co-innovation space that engaged employees in structured co-creation while the company explored a new value proposition for a foreign market. Over four months, a vague initial idea was translated into several business-model and value-proposition prototypes, tested through a series of experiments, including a customer co-creation pilot in which a key client directly influenced the technology. This process helped the company consolidate its strategic direction and supported successful entry into a new market.

Transformation Of The SME-size Company

In a transition project with an SME, we led a combined strategic and cultural transformation built around a co-innovation space. The work helped the company clarify its purpose, shift towards evidence-based decision-making, and co-create a new consultative sales approach. Through a series of strategy workshops and experiments, employee co-creation was embedded into the organisational culture, and a more profitable business model was designed and implemented.

Let's Create A Living Lab Tailored To Your Needs

For consortia seeking to strengthen the human-centric, systemic and sustainability dimensions of their Horizon Europe work, we can support the creation of a Living Lab environment that aligns innovation with real-world conditions.

For businesses seeking strategic clarity and/or cultural alignment during innovation or transformation, we help design Living Lab environments that connect organisational reality with future-ready business models.

For social enterprises addressing complex societal challenges, we create Living Lab spaces that integrate community needs, organisational culture and strategic pathways for sustainable impact.

Tell us briefly about your project, and we will connect with you.

Living Labs: Sustainable Business Design Living Lab