Social innovation labs are ‘hallelujah-ed’ as the latest vehicles for transforming the way our cities, our schools, our welfare programmes, and even our economic systems run. Yet we, lab practitioners, encounter a lack of critical literature and struggle to find learning spaces to improve our practices and deepen our knowledge. This paper aims to move beyond the current lab hype and deepen our discussions by asking ourselves tough questions. How do we ‘lab’ social challenges? Does labs' pursuit of systemic impact miss the point? And how could we better prompt social change? Our questioning raises four fundamental issues that seem to remain under-emphasized in our writing, thinking, and actions. They are particularly present in four areas of our lab practices: outcomes (we are falling prey to solutionism), focus (we tend to overlook the power of politics), goals (we over-emphasize the scaling of solutions while we under-emphasize scaling of ideas, values and ethics) and representation (we cover up the messy nature of human beings). To strengthen our lab practices, we conclude the paper with ten practical suggestions. [Author’s abstract].
Kieboom, Marlieke (2014) Lab matters : challenging the practice of social innovation laboratories, Amsterdam, Kennisland.
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