The European Network of Living Labs (ENoLL) aims to promote and enhance user-driven innovation ecosystems and focuses on facilitating knowledge exchange, joint actions and project partnerships among its members, on influencing EU policies, promoting living labs and enabling their implementation worldwide.
What are living labs?
Living labs are open innovation ecosystems where innovation takes place with the involvement of users in a collaborative and co-creative process. Research and innovation take place in real environments instead of laboratories and experiments under controlled, ideal conditions. They are, thus, practice-oriented. Living labs can now be found in all kinds of contexts, from new technologies and artificial intelligence, health, urban planning to environmental projects.
FiBL has been a member of the ENoLL network since 2021
From its earliest days, FiBL's participatory research approach has been characteristic of its work. Today our on-farm network comprises over 150 farms throughout Switzerland, where research is conducted in close cooperation with farmers and new methods and products are developed. This participatory approach is also implemented in our international projects, e.g. in India, Kenya and Bolivia.
Through close collaboration with farmers and knowledge exchange in our extension activities, new trends, ideas and problems at farm-level or along the sustainable food value chain can be identified quickly and translated into new research and development projects. FiBL also collaborates closely with institutions in the value chain: manufacturers of primary products such as seeds, fertilisers and organic pesticides, producer organisations such as Bio Suisse, food processors, retailers and various research and educational institutions.
In addition to increased visibility and positioning FiBL as a proven driver of innovation, a membership with ENoLL also means that new impulses can enrich FiBL's work through exchanges with living labs from different disciplines and countries. It further provides opportunities for cooperation and synergies with members of this international network.
Further information
Contact
- Knut Schmidtke
- Chigusa Keller
Link
enoll.org: Website of the European Network of Living Labs (ENoLL)