What is a social lab?

Tackling climate change and starting a venture are challenging on their own. In designing the Smart Energy Challenge we needed to help people take on both these challenges at once, and that our participants probably had busy day jobs too. We drew on the data at hand - thinking, models and processes ranging from Lean, Agile, Design, Theory U, skilled volunteering, startup weekends, social enterprise and Collective Impact.

Then along came Zaid Hassan's social labs concept. Like Collective Impact, Social Labs provides a 'meta' or superstructure model, for connecting people around a common and 'wicked' challenge, and across traditional organisational boundaries. I also see the Social Labs concept providing a clear distinction between 'programme' and 'project'. Projects (tactics) are connected within a programme (the Lab) for continuous experimentation and learning towards impact at scale.

Here is what Zaid says:

"Labs most traditionally can be thought of as physical spaces. But they are also institutional spaces that support particular practices, such as research and innovation. The dominant institutions that are currently tasked with addressing complex social challenges are arguably failing because they are not supportive of the types of practices needed to crack these challenges.

What makes a lab a lab is:
- the focus on a specific challenge or domain
- a stable space supportive of the practices required to address that challenge
- a disciplined practice of experimentation

Social labs are different from traditional labs in that they required a team that reflects the social diversity of the challenges they’re addressing to do the work. In other words social labs are different in that they are not run by teams of scientists or technocrats but diverse teams."

But just like we mixed up the data available to create the Smart Energy Challenge, we'll apply similar creative licence to what we do next. And who know's what influence will be just around the corner too.

• Sam Rye (LifeHack/Enspiral) has compiled a list of Social Labs resources here.