Exploring the Potential of Festivals as Living Labs for Systemic Innovation: Insights from the Interdisciplinary Innovation Program DORP

Abstract

Living Labs offer a promising approach to develop and test sustainable system innovations. One particular type of Living Lab that has received limited attention is the Festival Living Lab (FLL). Festivals can be considered as temporary mini-societies, facing systemic sustainability challenges in areas such as water, energy, housing, logistics, waste management, food, and behaviour. The temporary nature of festivals allows for adjustments to the overall societal system, allowing for experimentation with the mutual interrelationships between different aspects of the system. This makes festivals a distinctive setting for exploring sustainable system innovations. To assess the potential of FLLs as effective real-life experimentation environments, we introduce the Living Lab Activity Framework (LLAF), distinguishing various innovation stages and system levels. We utilise the LLAF to evaluate a selection of innovation projects from the DORP FLL held at the Welcome to The Village (WTTV) festival in Leeuwarden, the Netherlands. The analysis reveals that participating projects adapted their innovations based on new insights gained during various editions of the DORP FLL, demonstrating that festivals can support various stages of the innovation process on different system levels.