Essay by Lidia Gryszkiewicz, Tuukka Toivonen, & Ioanna Lykourentzou: “Innovation labs, with their aspirations to foster systemic change, have become a mainstay of the social innovation scene. Used by city administrations, NGOs, think tanks, and multinational corporations, labs are becoming an almost default framework for collaborative innovation. They have resonance in and across myriad fields: London’s pioneering Finance Innovation Lab, for example, aims to create a system of finance that benefits “people and planet”; the American eLab is searching for the future of the electricity sector; and the Danish MindLab helps the government co-create better social services and solutions. Hundreds of other, similar initiatives around the world are taking on a range of grand challenges (or, if you prefer, wicked problems) and driving collective social impact.
Yet for all their seeming popularity, labs face a basic problem that closely parallels the predicament of hub organizations: There is little clarity on their core features, and few shared definitions exist that would make sense amid their diverse themes and settings. …
Building on observations previously made in the SSIR and elsewhere, we contribute to the task of clarifying the logic of modern innovation labs by distilling 10 defining features. …
1. Imposed but open-ended innovation themes…
2. Preoccupation with large innovation challenges…
3. Expectation of breakthrough solutions…
4. Heterogeneous participants…
5. Targeted collaboration…
6. Long-term perspectives…
7. Rich innovation toolbox…
8. Applied orientation…
9. Focus on experimentation…
10. Systemic thinking…
In a recent academic working paper, we condense the above into this definition: An innovation lab is a semi-autonomous organization that engages diverse participants—on a long-term basis—in open collaboration for the purpose of creating, elaborating, and prototyping radical solutions to pre-identified systemic challenges…(More)”