LF 18 | What's next for 'Living Labs'?
LF 18 | What's next for 'Living Labs'?
Interviews with a number of leading healthy aging Living Labs point to a growing sense of confidence, business relevance and ROI. Let's hope others join them.
Living Labs should be the rule, not the exception
You don’t have to be an innovation expert to appreciate that it’s probably a good idea to ask people what they want before designing things for them. The surprise has been that in the aging space, this ‘design thinking’ is still a rarity. Too many products designed for older people are built based on assumptions and anecdotes. While intense personal experiences are often necessary to provide motivation to navigate the startup roller coaster, it’s important to ensure problems are widely shared. This is where Living Labs come in.
Defining Living Labs
Living Labs can be defined as “a user-centered, open innovation ecosystem based on a systematic user co-creation approach, integrating research and innovation processes in real-life communities & settings”. This is the definition use by the European Network of Living Labs (ENoLL), which coordinates, supports and accelerates Living Labs globally (and is tracking 480 of them).
So in effect, Living Labs take the concept of design thinking and gives it a formal, commercial structure. The definition breaks down to:
A network of collaborating stakeholders
Individuals at the center
A (data-driven), iterative product development process
Eight Living Lab leading lights (try saying that fast)
One of the ideas we’re exploring with Institute on Aging is developing a type of Living Lab in the Bay Area. As part of this process we conducted a review of a number of brain health / aging-focused Living Labs and below is a non-exhaustive list of eight I’ve looked at (feel free to let me know important ones I missed).
The insights below are from conversations with the first four: the Global Centre for Modern Ageing’s Life Lab (Julianne Parkinson), CABHI’s (Mel Barsky), NICA’s VOICE (Lynne Corner) and Alive Ventures (John Zapolski) about their work and the evolution of the space. If you’re looking to have a dinner party and geek out about Living Labs, these are the folks to have around the table. Bring a large bottle of wine and a notebook.
Canada’s CABHI is the gorilla in the room; With CAD $150m+ raised for their innovation hub they’ve got bold ambitions to be global and have built a new older adult advisory group, LEAP. They run hundreds of projects a year and have a variety of funding models and broad network of partnerships.
The UK’s NICA runs around 250 projects a year, and has a strong focus on brain health - 40% of projects. Examples of some NICA projects: virtual reality for urban environments, music as a tool for managing behaviors and continence care innovation (a major reason people move into long-term care).
Australia’s GCMA is an Adherent Member of ENoLL and specializes in transformational projects for government and business sectors across Asia and Australia, including: digital health and wellness in the home, dementia tech and medical device solutions, autonomous vehicle trials, and smart home design for ageing well.
Alive Ventures was a part of The SCAN Foundation and built up a research studio and venture builder addressing the core challenges of aging, based on in-depth research. The project was shut down in 2022 and new management came in and the Foundation’s priorities changed.
Four additional Living Labs on my To Do list to connect…
Living Labs Lessons Learned
Make innovation everybody’s business
For CABHI’s partner Baycrest’s 2,000 residents, the innovation testing is opt-out not opt-in. That not only means there are far more people in the pool but shapes the culture towards one where innovation is expected and “doing things how they’ve always been done’ is not an option.
Mixed-model commercialisation, including equity
The weakness for Living Labs is often the business model. Alive Ventures was funded by a $12m grant from the SCAN Foundation, and kept pure to their longer-term vision to build companies, but may have benefitted from short term consulting revenues, which the three others do. CABHI structures individual deals depending on the size of the client and is doing venture-like investing to participate in the upside. GCMA has an explicit twin-track approach: Public-benefit projects build knowledge and inform policy, products, and services for older people, as well as bespoke research projects for select corporate clients (corporate, government, and entrepreneurs).
Beware of creating Guinea Pigs
It’s important to navigate the fine line around ethics and framing of the activities of research vs insights. The former suggests breakthrough interventions are possible and may attract more older adults, whereas ‘insights’ is more aimed at corporate business value. Research projects may on the other hand provoke fear - “You don’t know the best approach so are experimenting….?”. Fairly compensating older adults for offering business value is particularly important for insights-projects.
Be Porous
There’s a constant interplay between doing things in-house vs. partnering and sending things outside. NICA considers themselves ‘Intel Inside’ partnering with other activities and programs such as with the UK government’s healthy aging innovation programs. Living Labs will often be “in the weeds” engaging older adults and getting feedback as well as going upstream towards more strategic initiatives. For example, one of GCMA’s initiatives is co-designing and delivering a gerontechnology blueprint strategy to support older adults ageing well at home in Hong Kong.
Act local, partner global
Canada’s CABHI combines proximity to the US market with a global reach - it has 140 test partners around the world. NICA has been funded by UK government to establish Chapters in Canada, US, Singapore, Italy, China and Taiwan. GCMA (note the G for Global…) has found value in being certified by ENoLL while along with best practices, benchmarking and recognition, gives it access to a global network of Living Labs. This together with its globally diverse advisory board provides visibility and awareness beyond Australia’s borders.
Expect to invest in behavior change
GCMA’s Parkinson noted that co-design within a Living Lab ecosystem is a relatively new concept compared to business as usual, often requiring education of partners and collaborators. An additional behavior change needed was around ageism - a limiting mindset:
“Ageism exists everywhere - inside businesses, government and communities. This can be a mindset limitation when developing products for older adults as consumers, especially for tech enabled solutions. Through well executed user-centred design methodologies, we can narrow the gap, ensuring products and services are fit for purpose and scalable” - Julianne Parkinson, GCMA
Tailor ROI to the stakeholder
It’s important to speak to the various stakeholders bosses about what they value. e.g. for governments economic activity, health outcomes and high quality jobs. CABHI’s companies have raised $500m in follow on funding, which appeals to their investors. Moreover, while the average life expectancy for people entering long-term care facilities in Canada is two years, residents at CABHI’s partner Baycrest (presumably benefitting at some level from the tech innovations) is four years.
Success has a thousand fathers
Models with multiple owners and funders - in particular government + business + academic + providers - seem the most solid. NICA from the UK was originally part of Newcastle University and got government funding to scale up. CABHI got matching government dollars with industry dollars, which came in part because of their tight affiliation with world-class provider Baycrest and its research group, Rotman Research Institute. GCMA’s origins benefited through seed funding from the South Australian government. Today, GCMA’s enterprise-based business model has governments, businesses and research organisations as clients in Australia and across the globe.
Be part of a product iteration machine
Insights on their own rarely lead to impact - it requires integration into a product building machine that will take those insights, develop or refine a product concept and then gather additional feedback. CABHI’s partnership with Baycrest provides an in-house product development partner.
Build a data strategy early
NICA runs 250 programs a year on its bespoke digital platforms, and since its founding - 10 years before GDPR was a glimmer in policy makers eyes - it’s had its own clear policy that the data belongs to the individual, and is controlled by them. Understanding what data is being collected and what value that will generate will be a key part of any commercialization plan.
Future vision - moving towards ownership
This is Stephen editorialising somewhat, but it seems that there’s an opportunity to give meaningful ownership to participants and co-creators, not just an Amazon rewards card (if that). With the rise of tokenization, we’re seeing more opportunities to identify and reward those spending time with research teams or coming up with great ideas, even if they only spent a few minutes. Web3 tools such as Coordinape that polls team members for who’s added the most value, or even Ray Dalio’s Dot Collector, providing real time scores on your meeting-mates, could be interesting here.
One size-fits none
Alive Ventures delivered some excellent insights and left a legacy of supporting and empowering older adults on their terms with some of the industry’s most inspiring narratives. GCMA, CABHI and NICA are all ongoing thriving businesses and growing, and each very different from the other. They’ve been built with some common elements but are unique to the context, their funders and their stakeholders. Looking forward I’m sure we’ll continue to see more evolution and sophistication of the Living Lab model, and I’d welcome input from those with strong opinions and new models to share.