Laboratories for Societal Innovation website

What is a Societal Innovation Lab?

A societal innovation lab is a generic term that aims to describe a new form of network, partnership, platform, or social movement. Societal labs are containers that seek to bring together diverse actors and players from across a particular segment of society to collaboratively tackle complex challenges. Challenges that transcend the ability of any single actor to deal with them.

A defining feature of these laboratories is that they are process based, their aim is not to work towards pre-defined goals, but through creative and collaborative processes generate emergent outcomes that potentially have a systemic impact. Inspiration for these processes are drawn from design thinking, organisational learning, conflict resolution, creative research, large-group interventions, enterprise incubation and many other sources.

Societal Innovation Labs are a emerging new institution, they are (semi) permanent spaces that generate and facilitate accelerated learning and innovation on a systemic level.