Lift:Lab Smart Living

The Lift:Lab Smart Living - A customized edition

The Lift:Lab Smart Living, was the latest Lift:Lab initiative which took place in Geneva on 6-8 June, 2018. This edition was dedicated to addressing the economical, social and environmental challenges of urbanization. It was a new experience with a format at the intersection of an innovation sprint and a learning expedition using open innovation and collaborative methodologies to stimulate co-creation.

We welcomed an eclectic team, composed of diverse profiles from the construction ecosystem, including architects, designers, lawyers, private and public developers, as well as the Vice Mayor of Bordeaux. The whole initiative was driven by Clothilde Cazamajour, a lawyer based in Bordeaux, who had attended a previous edition of Lift:Lab in 2017, and who saw in this format and its setting, an opportunity to work on the subject she cares deeply for, Smart Living.

Bordeaux is a city that is recognized to be among one of the most dynamic cities in France and which is currently leading one of the largest building operations in France with Bordeaux Euratlantique, a new neighborhood of over 730 ha. Cazamajour believes the city has the potential to be that of a thriving one, with better interaction amongst its citizens. Her aim is to develop creative solutions to the rising cost of living, and explore a wide range of modern services, providing a better life for all.

Participants had access to a rapid prototyping infrastructure, talks, and workshops, as well as the latest innovation methodologies. During their journey, they were surrounded by a great team of innovation coaches and a curated community of 20 experts.

The Lift:Lab working dynamic was a constant back-and-forth between action and reflection, with a rhythm that would force the participants to let go of old thinking and make space for the new. New encounters would enable ideas and discoveries to rise while fast-prototyping and collaborative sessions would enable the team to give life to ideas and nurture their common point of view.

Immersive experience: discovering Geneva-based initiatives and sharing knowledge

Hosting such an event in Geneva provided the opportunity to showcase a number of interesting initiatives that have been launched and explore the vibrant ecosystem in place. This was essential in providing our guests with an immersive experience by enabling them to visit and discover these initiatives, as well as to interact with key stakeholders.

The team worked during 3 days in different locations in Geneva, allowing them to discover and exchange with members from various ecosystems such as the Sustainable Development Goals at the SDG Solution Space, Smart City & energy at SIG (Services industriels de Genève), Art & Technology at the Flux Laboratory and startups at Seedspace.

A three-day lineup, packed with visits, encounters, workshops, prototyping, hard work, some fun and moments to reflect.

To navigate our way through the three-day program,we used ParKour, that has proved to be successful during previous Lift:Lab programs and which is suited to conduct innovation and transformation projects with multidisciplinary teams. The participants had access to a customized Lift:Lab booklet, giving them the opportunity to use an array of innovation tools among the following categories:

-Understand: to fully grasp the challenges they're facing
-Ideate: to generate new ideas and solutions
-Prototype: to make and design solutions
-Validate: to test and validate their ideas and key hypothesis
-Team’s point of view: to measure progress and work on team alignement

By getting involved with the great team of innovation facilitators that surrounded them, they were able to navigate uncertainty and progress iteratively by choosing the tools and activity that suited their intent based on their latest findings.

Along the way, they had the chance to meet and exchange with over 20 experts, with different formats of interaction, such as talks, workshops or one-on-one meetings. This enabled them to learn, as well as to gather feedback and insights, in order to nurture their innovation journey.

In addition to the different spaces where they had been working, the fast-paced program enabled them to cover a wide range of topics and even to test some of their ideas and prototypes on the field during a lunch at Jardin des Moraines, a collaborative urban garden in the heart of Carouge. This enabled them to iterate some of their prototypes, thanks to the feedback from some of the users, and to bring back new learnings.

To conclude the program, the team took the time to reflect and structure all the key learnings they made by writing their own reports, full of concrete outcomes, actions covering a wide spectrum, to affect change at multiple levels in the city.

Key Learnings

After three intense days, a rollercoaster of emotions, new encounters, and discoveries, let’s review what has been achieved:

A new business model to reduce the price of housing by 30 percent
A series of experiments to test the application of blockchain on legal transactions in the city
A plan to install GiftBoxes, an original architectural concept to introduce new citizens to their neighbors
And a training program to enable citizens to manage their neighborhood on their own
And much more

In addition to the concrete outcomes that emerged, we should also acknowledge that when joining the Lift:Lab, the team members were mostly strangers to each other, and were mostly focusing on their own priorities, but after the three days experience, there's now a team that trusts each other and continues working together.

Since June, the team meets once a month to keep on following up on what they have co-created in Geneva.

The real accomplishment was made by creating more than a team, an ecosystem. That is what they need to make real change happen.

Experts

Anand S