The Lab
Pioneering and sharing practical approaches to system innovation around the world
The Forum Lab aims to become a global centre of expertise in using system innovation to create profound change. It will share experience and new insights from practical work at the cutting edge, explore the system level challenges to building a sustainable economy, and help people working in sustainability increase their impact.
Forum’s ambition is to create a step change in the sustainability of our food, energy and finance systems by using system innovation. The Lab will help us learn lessons from how system innovation works in practice and pioneer new approaches. It provides space for us to explore and overcome the complex challenges to building a sustainable future.
We define system innovation as a set of interventions which shift a system onto a more sustainable path. We look at the whole system and how its different parts join up, we bring together key organisations to identify areas where we can intervene to create widespread change, and we plan multi-faceted action addressing behaviour, technology, policy and business practice.
We are adopting a deliberate, practical approach to systems innovation. We want to explore and learn how to trigger change at a system level, by creating the right conditions and learning how to remove potential barriers.
The Lab’s work will focus on four core activities:
- Community – we will create a community of system innovators to share best ideas and practical experience.
- Research – we will study the practice of system innovation, in Forum’s and other people’s work, and generate new insights.
- Resources – we will help others carry out system innovation by publishing tools and guides.
- Leadership – we will design learning programmes that equip leaders to reshape the systems they operate in, including Forum’s Masters in Leadership for Sustainable Development.
We’ve looked at how change happens and identified six major steps in the process that you can see in the diagram above. We are focussing our efforts on steps two to four:
- Understanding the need for change
- Diagnosing the system
- Pioneering new practice
- Scaling up
- Sustaining the transition
- Creating the new mainstream
The main approaches we use in system innovation are:
- Futures and diagnosis – we look at the whole system, the pressures it is under, and how it could become more sustainable
- Innovation – we develop new ideas and approaches that are good for people and the planet and create radical change
- Scaling up – we incubate, combine and spread new ideas, develop people’s capacity, build networks and remove barriers to change to help innovations become mainstream
- Sustainable business – we work with companies to innovate sustainable business models and to reshape the system they operate in so these achieve commercial success
