Abstract
A growing range of public, private and civic organisations, from Unicef through Nesta to NHS, now run units known as “innovation labs”. The hopeful assumption they share is that labs, by building on openness among other features, can generate promising solutions to grand challenges of systemic nature. Despite their seeming proliferation and popularisation, the underlying innovation principles embodied by labs have, however, received scant academic attention. This is a missed opportunity, because innovation labs appear to leverage openness for radical innovation in an unusual fashion. Indeed, in this exploratory paper we draw on original interview data and online self-descriptions to illustrate that, beyond convening “uncommon partners” across organisational boundaries, labs apply the principle of openness throughout the innovation process, including the experimentation and development phases. While the emergence of labs clearly forms part of a broader trend towards openness, we show how it transcends established conceptualisations of open innovation (Chesbrough, 2006), open science (David, 1998) or open government (Janssen et al., 2012).
Highlights
A growing range of public, private and civic organisations, from Unicef through Nesta to NHS, run or support units known as “innovation labs”
In the case of larger labs run and/or funded by Nesta the origin of core themes is more opaque, to the extent that the programme coordinators we interviewed were unaware of how these come about
In the above sub-sections (5.1 through 5.6) we have reported innovation lab characteristics that, in light of our data, seem central to the labs included in our sample and elucidate their approach to openness in the innovation process
Summary
A growing range of public, private and civic organisations, from Unicef through Nesta to NHS, run or support units known as “innovation labs”. To highlight just a few examples, the eLab is grappling with the key challenges of the electricity sector; London’s Finance Innovation Lab, showing yet more ambition, aims to rework the entire financial system, whereas the Unicef Labs innovate to alleviate the problems faced by children around the world Recent practitioner publications, such as Labcraft (Tiesinga & Berkhout, 2014) and i-teams (Puttick et al, 2014) have shed some light on how labs work in practice while stirring broader interest in this phenomenon. Despite their seeming proliferation and popularisation, the underlying innovation paradigm embodied by labs has so far received scant academic attention. This is a missed opportunity, because innovation labs are potentially fruitful vehicles for ISSN 2183-0606 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0
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