The Future of Labs - Part 3: Report & Explorations
The Future of Labs 2024 Gathering Report is out! Find out more about what happened and the recommendations for social (innovation) labs from 65+ practitioners who gathered in Canada to explore the future of lab practice.
Future of Labs produced knowledge artifacts to help local, national and social innovation lab practitioners around the world to strengthen their practices as well as help funders and enablers of lab practice to better evaluate lab proposals.
This is the 3rd part of a series about the Future of Labs Gathering I was part of in May 2024.
If you haven't already, you might like to read:
Sam Rye
Sam Rye
2024 Future of Labs Gathering - Final Report
The report features a synthesis of the conversations held at the Future of Labs gathering, summarising what was heard and initial impressions. The end of the report discusses potential working conclusions, recommendations, next steps, and questions for the field to consider.
You can read the report here:
You can also find all the other content including the Primer Report and Podcast episodes at the Future of Labs Gathering page hosted by Action Lab:
Reflections and explorations
Firstly I want to extend some gratitude to the amazing team who worked on the gathering and then subsequently the team that convened around this report.
Secondly another batch of thanks to Social Innovation Canada and Monash Sustainable Development Institute who made it possible for me to attend the Gathering.
It's worth saying that this report is sizeable - the work to pull together the run down and synthesis of the event itself (which had multiple streams happening concurrently) AND a sizeable chunk of sensemaking and meaning making in the back half is no small feat!
So personally, I'm taking a few things away.
1) Bolstering the International Field of "Labs"
The report pinpointed some of the discussions which were bubbling away about the value of comparing notes, sharing learnings, and connecting in person for meaningful exploration of practice, patterns and progress.
There was 3 of us who had travelled - Ione from Basque Country, Sonja from Serbia and myself from Australia, plus there were several folks who had international backgrounds but were living in Canada now. Adding this small cohort into a 65+ grouping of practitioners injected just enough 'insights from elsewhere' to add an international flavour to some of the conversations.
I hosted a session on the final day in which people expressed the desire and value of connecting networks across Canada - Europe - Asia-Pacific - Australia - Aotearoa NZ, as well as explicitly trying to bring in more participants and practitioners from the global south which was under-represented.
Many social innovation lab practitioners have to operate outside of large organisations (such as in small consultancies, or employed by auspicing organisations on project contracts), which makes it harder to support both their ability to publish about their work, as well as attend national or international gatherings. Potentially this is where the likes of a Fellowship program might support bolstering the field, or scholarships might be provided through Academic / Philanthropic / Community Organisations.
Finally, I think it's worth adding that there is a close relationship and potentially a confluence of social innovation lab practice and living lab practice happening. I hope to write more about this, and what they might learn from each other soon.
2) Addressing notions of "Scaling" in Labs
At the Gathering, there was a diversity of notions about whether Labs should focus on working deeply with the participants to navigate challenges and shift the power and enabling conditions of that challenge, versus an explicit mandate to explore, test, proliferate and embed initiatives, services, products and policies.
Whilst I thought this was an interesting discussion, I couldn't help think that people were talking about different theories of change, and series of 'services' which a Lab might offer. This was picked up in the later recommendations part of the report to some extent (and the do's and dont's). To me, these are strategic choices which need to be made by people designing and/or funding a Lab, from a blend of factors including available resources, capabilities, time available, scope of the challenge, maturity of the people and organisations involved, and more. These choices might be made more easy by defining a Lab Typology to help guide design based on what is being proposed or reviewed as a Lab evolves over time. For me, Labs aren't best developed as short term interventions - they are platforms to come together to tackle complex challenges. More about this below.
Likewise, there was a little discussion in the report about different notions of scaling, which is something I've also started writing about in the report I'm writing on living labs. Scaling up, out, deep, initial conditions and 'scree' are all viable options (as per InWithForward's 2018 post), Good Shift & Auckland Co-design Lab recently wrote about Right Scaling, and I even started to explore biomimicry as a means to understand scaling awhile back.
3) Towards a Typology?
As I mentioned above - considering a typology as a way to understand differing 'defining characteristics' of different lab approaches, might be a helpful step in making choices when designing, funding, sustaining and maturing labs.
I preface this with the fact I'm currently working on a report for Monash University which features a typology for living labs. I'm not 100% sure of whether a typology for social innovation labs would be different entirely, whether there should be an overlap or they are the same thing, but when I consider social innovation labs represented at the Gathering, I think about a multi-sided spectrum which was considering the intent and choices in the lab design or evolution. Maybe something like this:
Future of Labs - more to come?
I was delighted to see that there's a nod toward the idea that the Future of Labs may not just be a one off gathering, but perhaps there might be the energy and opportunity to continue the drumbeat.
I have already got so much out of the gathering itself, the reports and podcasts, but especially the relationships formed in the retreat rooms, across the dinner tables, and around the fire.
I've alreadxy started a little 'Lab Penpals' project with a G and Ione who I became fast friends with at the gathering and in the weeks and months after across Zoom calls and messaging. We shall see whether the project spills out onto the internet at some point, but initially we've been surfacing and corresponding back and forth about how we've been experiencing some of the 'hot topics' of the lab field, across our different contexts of Canada, Europe and Australia.
Here's hoping this is Part III of many, and we continue to shape the Future of Labs together.
Comments ()