Experimentation is crucial for cities to test and prototype new solutions that address complex societal challenges, such as climate change. Urban Living Labs are open ecosystems that promote innovation and learning in real-life settings, engaging multiple stakeholders to co-create, prototype, implement, and evaluate solutions to different societal issues. Mainstreaming this approach into regular policymaking, moving from pilot projects, which usually have limited funding and duration, towards continuous programmes of local innovation, is a challenge with an empirical gap to understand further. Our study contributes to science, policymaking, and practice by investigating the mechanisms that foster development pathways for Living Labs' longevity within ten Coastal City Living Labs under the European Union's Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation project, ‘SCORE: Smart Control of the Climate Resilience in European Coastal Cities’. We reveal the key strategies and lessons learned on sustaining the Living Labs and their initiatives beyond a project. We developed the Living Lab Longevity Framework as a result of a thorough literature review of both academic articles and Living Lab practical methodologies and frameworks, leading to seven steering mechanisms for development pathways: Learning by doing, Partnering, Embedding, Stabilizing, Professionalizing, Sharing knowledge, and Engaging. Our findings demonstrate that Living Labs sustain themselves by reinforcing these mechanisms in combination, rather than in isolation. Our study highlights important interlinks among sets of mechanisms and explores the strategies empirically used by Urban Living Labs to advance from short-term experiments to enduring ecosystems for urban innovation and transformation.
Aniche et al. (Thu,) studied this question.