A home for ideas, people and projects that facilitate an international conversation about societal challenges

and provide institutional infrastructure and practical resources for concrete action

Together with excellent living labs, future centers, corporate RDI centers, design labs, think-tanks and NGOs, innovators, experts and committed citizens

We aim to become a laboratory for mission-driven innovation, with the possibility of creating real breakthroughs – moonshots – on the issues we address.

Why do we want a Global Lab?

Too many innovation projects, even successful initiatives addressing global challenges like climate adaptation, take place in the confines of national, institutional or expertise silos. Often even successful results prove difficult to scale from place to place, and from local to global. This makes it difficult to tackle many of society’s major challenges effectively.

This is why we are working to co-create a Global Lab for Societal Innovation, which can address important societal issues as collaborative innovation projects – orchestrated initiatives which allows different organizations in different countries to work in a focused way, at the same time, on diverse aspects of major societal challenges.

What’s on the horizon?

Engaging with climate change, strengthening climate resilience

Developing 21st Century literacies

Formulating lessons to be learned

Learning how to leverage distributive collective intelligence for addressing societal challenges

Co-creating a convivial online commons

Climate Resilience

Mission ONE – the focus of the first Global Lab – is Climate & Societal Resilience.

Resilience is the capacity to bounce back from a crisis, and bounce forward with an opportunity. Climate resilience is seen as the capacity of a system to anticipate, prepare for, and respond to trends, stresses, disturbances, crisis and disruptive events related to climate, both in the environment and in society. It is a key building block for societal renewal.

Climate resilience relates to many issues, all of which may be focus points for specific projects and practical prototypes :

Environment

• Sea levels rising
• Extreme weather
• Desertification fresh water
• Loss of biodiversity

Technology

• Technologies for breakthroughs and opportunities
• Technologies for making a difference in specific places and with specific issues
• Technologies and disruption, and unintended consequences
  

Climate in society

• Massive waves of climate refugees in the next decade
• Climate of fear or hope, for accepting change, for working together
• How we allocate and accept responsibility and resources for resilience

The climate in our heads

• Lifestyle
• Identity and entitlement (freedom to consume, freedom to waste) 
• Habits, behavior and loss
• Moving from awareness to interest, from interest to desire, and from desire to action