About

This model shows all the components of a comprehensive living lab, both methodologically as well as the parties that need to be involved. In the figure below we show a transdisciplinary network involving government, business, academia and citizens (yellow circles), together solving complex societal challenges. The living lab approach has five main attributes (grey inner square):

• User centered: products, services, and systems are designed together with the end-user.
• Experimentation in live-scenarios: products, services and systems are tested in real or virtual locations in an uncontrolled environment.
• Stakeholder co-creation: All parties innovate and research together to solve a common challenge.
• Open and user innovation: a collaborative approach that sources ideas from the user, as well as from internal and external perspectives.
• Multi-method approach: combine different procedures from research and innovation.

By default, UU’s own academics, students and operational staff participate in all of our living labs. This principle is summarised in the UULabs model. The model shows how four parties on campus collaborate in labs: research and education, UU operations, campus users and the UU board. UULabs prioritises labs that best match this model.

Living Lab experiments are designed to be a learning experience for all while situated in a real-life context. As such, Living labs are about the following three E’s: exploring, experimenting and experiencing. Exploring emphasises gaining appreciation of projects and their context, including the expectations of stakeholders. Experimenting emphasises floating of ideas, assessing responses of colleagues and other stakeholders and testing them in practice. Experience relates to the real-life situations that influence the behaviour or mindset of participants. The emphasis here is on sharing, collating, discussing and evaluating.

Living labs stimulate bottom-up and open innovation. By combining living labs in a coherent innovation portfolio, UULabs promotes continuous innovation and knowledge generation. For this, UULabs strives to make all research data of its labs publicly available.

“Sustainable Development is at the heart of everything we do” Strategic Plan 2025

Our living labs align with existing sustainability policies of Utrecht University and therefore actively contributes to UU’s strategic sustainability ambitions for research, education and campus operations. In doing so, UULabs offers a stage to showcase to society UU’s contribution to sustainable development. By creating, supporting and actively communicating about living labs our efforts will become well-known to a wider audience.

Within campus operations we focus our living lab portfolio on four main categories: Climate Action, Biodiversity, Circularity and a Creative Space.

While our living labs are local, the sustainability challenges they address are global. Therefore, each individual living lab contributes toward the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Utrecht University puts these SDGs at the core of its education, research and operations (UU Strategic Plan 2025 page 21, 23).

The living lab portfolio categories and indicators are based on the SDGs. UULabs are part of a broader network in the region, with parties active in sustainability related lab work. UULabs collaborates with these parties whenever possible.

Living labs help increase and strengthen collaborations between students, operational and academic staff in university and on campus. UULabs offers our students and academics an opportunity to learn and apply professional skills to solve real-life issues on campus. Vice versa, operational staff gets to work with their academic colleagues and students, tackling complex sustainability issues. As a result, researchers will have test beds to increase the social impact of their research, students will have more sustainability-related learning opportunities in and outside their curriculum and operational staff is supported in their effort to achieve operational sustainability targets.

We will also engage external parties - such as innovative companies and governments - in living labs if that is necessary to achieve the lab’s objectives.

The transformation of our campus towards sustainability and into a best practice for others requires a behavioural change of all the University community. This transformation is complex and requires transdisciplinary teams working together from different viewpoints to solve it. It can involve topics varying from a simple lunch sandwich, travel behaviour, to increasing biodiversity on campus.