What Are Living Labs?

• July 15, 2026

Living Labs are real-world spaces where citizens, researchers, businesses, and public authorities work side by side to co-create solutions to shared problems, rather than testing ideas in isolated laboratories. The European Network of Living Labs (ENoLL) defines them as user-centred, open innovation ecosystems based on a systematic user co-creation approach, integrating research and innovation processes directly into real-life communities and settings. For maritime restoration projects like PHAROS, this means the fishing village, the harbour, and the school become the laboratory, not a university building far removed from the sea.

Why Move Innovation Out of the Lab

Traditional research often develops a solution first and asks the public to accept it afterward. Living Labs flip that order. ENoLL identifies five elements that must be present: active user involvement, a real-life setting, multi-stakeholder participation, a multi-method approach, and genuine co-creation. This structure exists because complex issues like climate change, pollution, or coastal erosion are what researchers call “wicked problems,” meaning they have no single fix and involve conflicting interests among fishers, regulators, tourism operators, and residents alike.

Living Labs: A Rehearsal, Not a Performance

A Living Lab works like a dress rehearsal for a play rather than the opening night. On opening night, mistakes are costly and the audience judges the final product. In rehearsal, actors, directors, and stagehands can stop mid-scene, change the script, and try again with immediate feedback from everyone in the room. A Living Lab gives new ocean restoration methods that same low-stakes rehearsal space, letting communities test, break, and refine an idea with the people who will actually live with it, before it becomes permanent policy or infrastructure.

The Quadruple Helix Behind Every Lab

Living Labs are built around what is called the quadruple helix model, bringing together citizens, government, industry, and academia as equal partners in the same process. Public authorities keep the work aligned with policy frameworks and societal priorities, while citizens contribute lived experience that no dataset can fully capture. This is not a cosmetic addition to research, it is the actual engine that makes a Living Lab function, because a solution designed without one of these four groups tends to fail when it meets the real world.

PHAROS Living Labs in the Atlantic and Arctic

PHAROS has taken this ENoLL model and applied it directly to ocean restoration, building Living Labs across Gran Canaria, Ireland, and other Atlantic and Arctic sites to place citizens and end-users at the centre of marine innovation. Each PHAROS Living Lab organises around four stakeholder groups: citizen scientists working through the MINKA platform, Marine Protected Area managers using the Blueprint decision-making platform, Blue Schools connecting classrooms to hands-on marine learning, and Fisher Guardians adopting better on-board waste practices. A fifth strand, Litter Entrepreneurs, runs webinars and hackathons that help citizens and small businesses turn marine litter reduction into viable micro-enterprises.

MarCoLab in the Canary Islands is a concrete example of this model in motion. Launched with government officials, scientists, and industry leaders at the Canary Islands Maritime Cluster, its guiding message was that protecting the sea can no longer be left to experts alone. The name itself carries the philosophy: Mar for the ocean, Co for collaboration and co-creation, and Lab for the living lab structure that ties it all together within the quadruple helix. A second PHAROS Mega Event followed in Kerry and West Cork, Ireland, in May 2026, extending the same Living Lab community-building approach to a new Atlantic coastline.

Islands as Natural Testing Grounds

PHAROS has deliberately chosen island territories as prime locations for these Living Labs, and the reasoning is practical rather than symbolic. Islands have strong land-sea interaction, high environmental sensitivity, and tightly knit stakeholder communities, which makes them well suited to piloting Nature-Based Solutions and blue economy initiatives at a manageable scale before wider rollout. This logic was reinforced at a January 2026 workshop at the Cluster Marítimo de Canarias, where PHAROS partners shared best practices for setting up and running effective Living Labs across different island contexts.

From Local Pilot to Basin-Wide Network

What separates a Living Lab from a one-off community meeting is durability and connection to a wider network. PHAROS Living Labs feed data and outcomes into MINKA, a citizen science platform where communities can observe environmental changes, analyse the results, and deliberate on next steps together. This mirrors the approach of sister project Blue4All, which runs 14 Living Labs and 11 information sites across European and Brazilian waters to support Marine Protected Area management under the EU Biodiversity Strategy. By linking individual island labs into this broader basin-wide network, PHAROS ensures that a solution proven in Gran Canaria or Ireland does not stay local, it becomes a template other Atlantic and Arctic communities can adapt for themselves.