This chapter zooms out from several years of field research activities and from 30 case studies to propose a taxonomy of open labs based on four dimensions: a strategic intent (or a “mission”) framing the expected contributions to the ecosystem, the role of the local community in the dynamics of the open lab, a portfolio of services, and a physical space fostering knowledge exchange and the delivery of services. The taxonomy makes it possible to explain roles, functions, and mechanisms at work behind the communities, spaces, and services. It is most useful to explain evolution trajectories and the analysis of business models.

The chapter investigates open labs from the perspective of their business models, as a series of interactions between services, demand, operations, and capital. The chapter shows first the tensions between profitability, sustainability, and strategic intentions, and identifies specific options for non-profit, social business and for-profit ventures. However, appraising this tension is difficult because open labs are most often encapsulated into complex organisational designs. The chapter investigates then the tension between sustainability and scale, with a focus on occupancy rates, threshold effects and the management of fixed costs. The last sub-section finally analyses the difficulty at handling together scale issues, and the dynamics of knowledge life cycles and strong ties inside communities. The key for sustainability locates in the ability at solving this difficult equation.

The multiplication of open labs (Schmidt and Brinks, 2017; Mérindol et al. 2016) develops in parallel with new entrepreneurial profiles and motivations (Capdevila 2015, Fabbri and Charue-Duboc, 2013). These spaces operate as innovation platforms (Mérindol and Versailles, 2017) and combine different functions: incubation of startups, animation of communities of entrepreneurs, outreach through academic networks, all of this in a multi-sectoral and transverse approach. This chapter specifically investigates open labs active in the domains of art and culture, hereafter “open art labs” (Aubouin, 2018). The chapter analyzes the dynamics of artistic, technological, and entrepreneurial initiatives, the internal organization and managerial practices inside open lab arts, the role of spaces and their management. The chapter introduces a taxonomy of entrepreneurial approaches prevailing in different open art lab configurations. It brings out the role of artists as innovators (Sternberg, 1999; Oakley, 2009). This chapter identifies three contributions of artists: (1) explorers, promoters of a new vision, creating bridges between different worlds; (2) boundary spanners (Levina and Vaast, 2005) articulating artistic, social, and economic expertise; and (3) co-producers of innovation (Imbert and Chauvet, 2013). The chapter investigates three French examples of open art labs: 104 Factory, Artlab (Digital Arti), and Atelier Arts Sciences (CEA Tech). The focus on different projects developed in these open art labs makes it possible to analyze the sources of concomitant artistic, economic, and social value creation.

This chapter deals with living labs active on health care topics. We identify three functions for these living labs: (i) they contribute to energizing health care innovation ecosystems by bringing together hospitals, private companies, and other institutions based on the user-centric approach; (ii) they act as architects of innovation communities through particular events, such as hackathons, enabling co-creation activities; (iii) they promote the emergence of communities of practice by creating the conditions conducive to the involvement of users in innovation processes. The chapter shows that these three functions can be combined even though they require specific skills. For each of these functions, the chapter also analyzes the role played by the physical space where activities organized by the living labs take place. Several categories of spaces are identified: interstitial, user-friendly, and functional. Their respective functionalities are mobilized to serve the different roles of the living lab. Functional spaces contribute to existing ecosystems. Interstitial spaces foster the emergence of communities of innovation. User-friendly spaces support the development of communities of practice.

The orchestration of ecosystems to drive innovation is increasingly important for business and society to effectively address contemporary business and societal challenges that involve a variety of stakeholders. Current research on innovation ecosystems emphasizes the spatial distribution of these stakeholders by looking at how and where to gather people coming from different organizations and domains. However, this leaves underexplored the temporal dynamics at play in innovation ecosystems. This represents major barriers to advancing our collective understanding of how innovation ecosystems form and function, how they make innovation communities emerge and grow over time, and how to accelerate their progress. In this chapter, we argue that temporal dimensions are as important as their spatial counterparts in such complex and continuously evolving systems. To do so, we expose how events help manage the temporal dynamics of innovation ecosystems by creating and nurturing the necessary communities and underlying dynamics for innovation ecosystems to exist and thrive.

This chapter examines how open labs contribute to the success of entrepreneurial ecosystems using the case of Communitech in the Kitechener-Waterloo region of Canada. Collaboration is at the heart of the culture of this region. The momentum of collaboration motivated a group of passionate entrepreneurs to help each other to build successful businesses in the region. This association was formalized and became an Open-Lab whose mission is to perpetuate the culture of collaboration and knowledge sharing by reflecting it in its value propositions. Communitech developed an associative model that strengthens the sense of belonging of entrepreneurs and built a physical space whose design reflects its desire to promote collaboration. Initially focused on start-ups looking for resources, its value proposition gradually expanded to meet the needs of large corporations seeking innovation and scale-ups wanting to expand internationally. Communitech encouraged the colocation of several actors of the region's entrepreneurial ecosystem. Thus, it makes a real difference for the entrepreneurial ecosystems by linking their contributions - support services and space - to strong community values.

In the last decade, the coworking movement, that was initiated in urban environments, has been expanding to rural areas. In both cases, the concept of community appears as one of the most crucial aspects. However, in urban spaces, community dynamics tend to be circumscribed to the space, whereas in rural areas, their territorial embeddedness appear also as very relevant. Based on the case of Cowocat Rural, the network of rural coworking spaces in Catalonia, this chapter analyses the community dynamics at the different spatial levels (from the internal to the regional level), and the managerial challenges encountered. The results suggest that in rural areas, the capacity of developing local communities in the municipality and beyond is important for the sustainability of the project, and to contribute to the goal of developing the local socio-economic context.

The chapter presents two cases of the emergence of communities of innovation in highly constrained and heavily regulated systems: the education and the public service. In the first case we show how a community of educators and researchers set up over a decade a powerful middleground for innovation. Starting from a single table in a corridor at the university they progressively hacked their way from inside, introduced numerous pedagogical innovations and became one of the main representatives of interdisciplinarity in the educational system. The second case reports about the introduction of Design approaches in public policy, showing how the creation of an open forum within the public administration, including spaces for experimentation, led to the emergence of considerable innovation in the administration and public service. The cases illustrate how even in extremely constrained, centralized, and hierarchical fields, innovation and disruption can be negotiated and progressively percolated through the system. The process starts with an epistemic community (Haas 1989, 1992, Cohendet et al 2014) that leverages physical spaces for talking about and testing innovation, then progressively orchestrating resources for getting exposure and recognition, and then gaining leverage to influence the system through special projects. We show how the development of Open Labs helps the development of middlegrounds environments outside the market economy, starting from the ground up rather than from large firms. We also consider the organizational conditions for the success of these open labs.

In this chapter, we analyse the case study of TransMedTech Institute (iTMT) as a living lab in the healthcare ecosystem, highlighting how this organization contributes to shape the dynamics of the medical technology sector in Montréal, Canada and abroad. The institute was one of the first healthcare initiatives in Quebec, to envision the entire innovation value chain from the research project to the premarket field by focusing the innovation process on the users, bringing together all stakeholders to codevelop the cutting-edge medical technology. We highlight the role of a community of passionate researchers who succeeded at establishing a shared vision at the origin of the living Lab and show that this dynamic is characterized by sequences of community formation and the orchestration of diverse ‘knowledge commons’ to foster and validate innovation. We also demonstrate the capacity of the community to foster different innovation and entrepreneurial commons thought the program ‘Innovateur en résidence’ [innovator in residence]. Based on our observations, the dynamics of iTMT as an active living lab in healthcare focuses on the formation, development, and maintenance of the following sequence of different commons. Our view is that the understanding of the formation, development, and evolution of iTMT is inherently related to the articulation of different commons to establish interdisciplinary boundary crossing collaboration in healthcare ecosystem.

Open labs play a fundamental role on territories as catalysts of new collaborations between public and private actors. The chapter shows how open labs represent boundary spaces supporting the development of Triple and Quadruple Helix dynamics. Based on open labs operating in the health case and smart cities sectors in continental France, the chapter shows that open labs serve the installation of new governance models for innovation in urban ecosystems. They support new forms of collaboration between universities and research agencies, firms, and public actors when trusted interactions already exist between these three institutional spheres. Open labs also operate as boundary spaces testing and initiating programs involving active end-users, citizens, and artists in the Quadruple Helix governance mode. The chapter identifies boundary conditions in the dynamics of collaboration between Helixes. It explains the emergence of win-win-win situations thanks to the creation of a neutral space, the role of trust and ways of working prevailing in open labs. The chapter stresses the importance of inputs made by the management team to operate the function of boundary space, it and identifies open questions about the cooking method appropriate to articulate the sub-components with doses of knowledge space, consensus space, and innovation space. However, it also shows that it remains difficult to characterise ex ante the sequence between these aspects. Last, but not least, the chapter points out the difficulties inherent to the installation of a consensus space with the civil society in the Quadruple Helix framework.

However, the future of innovation and the management of innovation makes it necessary to go beyond managerial issues and draw perspectives about the evolution of public opinions and the commitment of so-called “civil society” to innovation and technological progress. After 20 years of anthropocentric and user-centric innovation, a major challenge has emerged in France and in other European countries. Even if this description somehow represents a simplification, the inflexion appeared some years ago after three main phases in the management of innovation: “science-” and “techno-push” innovation prevailed until the 1980s; “market-pull” innovation complemented it from the 1990s onwards; and “user-centric” innovation finally gained momentum during the two last decades. A new phase emerges now with the need for “sustainability-centric” innovation because the other pathways towards innovation cannot generate enough adhesion around the notion of “progress”. The acceptability of innovation has become a major issue in society. It turns into a threat to the diffusion of innovation and to the dissemination of technological progress. Lots of questions must be answered about innovation, that demand innovators to adopt a more comprehensive approach. To reinstall a positive vision of expertise, scientists, engineers, and technologists should now work together with other human and social science specialists to fight partial perspectives and bring to the surface the ideologies underlying fake news. The importance of open labs resurfaces here. As with all other organisations working on innovation, open labs now have to consider this societal inflexion. They can contribute to bringing solutions to these threats to our future.