ENoLL - European Network of Living Labs

Picture a Living Lab practitioner who reads English perfectly well on paper but finds a training delivered entirely in English, week after week, quietly exhausting by the third session.

We think about that person a lot, because plenty of skilled practitioners in our community are not first-language English speakers, and it is easy to assume a course like this caters more to the fluent majority.

The Virtual Learning Lab now runs in two tracks, and one of them was built with exactly that person in mind. Every lesson on the Self-Guided Track carries AI-generated subtitles in English, French, Spanish and Italian.

We want to be straight about the difference, because it is a real one. The Live Track runs in English, live with the trainer, the weekly premiere and the Q&A straight after it. The Self-Guided Track has no live component at all, so lessons open one after another as you finish each one, and you can read the subtitles at your own pace, in your own language.

Which means the choice between the two tracks is not only about your diary. If English is not your first language, that is a genuine reason to look at the Self-Guided Track first.

One honest note: the self-assessment that will grant you the Certificate of Competence is offered in English, so it is worth knowing that going in.

Registration is open, and everything is on the course page.

https://enoll.pulse.ly/dzxsldgwhg

Picture a room of Living Lab practitioners building small models of themselves out of LEGO bricks before the workshop has even properly started. That's how this OLLD26 workshop opens, and it's not an icebreaker for its own sake. Hilde Vandenhoudt and Leen Broeckx of LiCalab, the living and care lab at Thomas More University of Applied Sciences and OLLD26 co-organiser, built the hands-on workshop around a genuinely difficult problem: how do you design inclusive digital services for people who are already excluded from the tools you'd normally use to ask them? Drawing on lessons from a real digital health literacy co-creation project, Hilde and Leen guide participants through LEGO Serious Play, first building personas representing underserved groups, then racing through an ideation sprint to generate as many inclusive service ideas as possible, before prototyping and voting on the strongest ones as a group. Leen has spent over a decade managing LiCalab's panel of more than 350 citizens, care organisations and caregivers, and Hilde brings epidemiology and participatory action research experience from primary health care work across sub-Saharan Africa and Flanders. Between them, this is a workshop built from real fieldwork, not theory. You leave with practical guidelines for using LEGO Serious Play on your own complex challenges, not just a nice afternoon with bricks.

https://openlivinglabdays.pulse.ly/bvcnikv1sz

Some of you told us, more than once, that you wanted to do the Virtual Learning Lab and could not make the dates work.

We have heard it at events, in emails, and from Members who fully intended to join and then watched the weeks fill up without them.

This autumn there is a second way in.

The Self-Guided Track opens every lesson the moment you register. There is no weekly slot to protect, no cohort moving at a pace you have to match, and no waiting for the next intake, because it runs all year. Three calendar months of access from the day you register, and you take the all modules plus the introductory Week 0 in whatever order works for you.

The Live Track is still there for anyone who wants the trainer in the room. It keeps its weekly rhythm, and each lesson now opens with a live premiere and a live Q&A with the trainer.

Both share the same content and lead to the same certificates.

If you were one of the people who told us, thank you. This one came from you.

https://enoll.pulse.ly/l5sdwx3r1z

Imagine standing in a coffee break between sessions, and the person next to you, who works for an insurance company, starts swapping numbers with someone from a completely different sector, even though they've both lived in the same small town for years and never once spoken. That's the moment Gorazd Weiss from ZSI, the Centre for Social Innovation in Vienna, points to when he talks about what a Living Lab actually does.

ZSI has just joined ENoLL as an Innovation Partner, and this one feels overdue. Since 1988, ZSI has been asking a question most innovation conversations skip: what's the point of any of it if it doesn't have value for society? They've spent 35 years building answers, through projects like Careables, which helped makers and people with disabilities design assistive technology together, and RRI Tools, a toolbox on responsible research still used across Europe today.

"It's joint forces," says Elisabeth Unterfrauner, ZSI's Scientific Director and CEO. "Living Labs and social innovation go hand in hand." We think our Members will recognise a kindred spirit here.

Read the full story of how ZSI got here, and what they hope to build with our Community next: https://enoll.pulse.ly/kq7pxn8opg
Have you worked with ZSI on a project, or crossed paths with them at an event? Tell us about it in the comments.

A big thank you to our friends at Open to Innovate Living Lab for having us in Bologna last month, it was a real pleasure to be part of that room.

At We Make Future 2026, our Chairman Wim De Kinderen and our Head of Network Gabriella Quaranta joined Asia Guerreschi from Open to Innovate, part of Clust-ER Innovate, on a roundtable about one plain question: what does it actually take to build the city of the future?

Not more screens or sensors. The panel kept coming back to the same idea, that the real work is designing with the people who live in a city, not designing something clever and hoping they will use it. Open to Innovate showed us what that looks like close up, on their own turf, and we are grateful for the invitation.

As Gabriella Quaranta put it, “For ENoLL, participating in WMF was an opportunity to bring the Living Lab approach to a broader innovation community, while learning from other inspiring initiatives putting people at the center and co-creation in practice. Cities of the future won’t be built through technology alone, but through collaboration. Bringing the Living Lab approach, and the Network, to conversations like this helps ensure that innovation remains grounded in people’s needs and connected to the territories where change happens.”

Have you been part of a co-design process that actually changed how a place got built or used? We would love to hear about it in the comments.

More on the session here: https://enoll.pulse.ly/sdyv9nhqce

Big news for the Living Labs Community: ENoLL has been selected as a member of the future Zero Pollution Stakeholder Platform.

This means a seat at the table with the European Commission, as it shapes the next phase of work on pollution-free food, homes, streets, rivers and cities. The first meeting is on 22 September.

Valentino Piana, who represents ENoLL on the Zero Pollution recommendations, shared what this means: "The world of Living Labs can be proud that its voice is heard and asked for, in a critical moment, by the European Commission. We are considered as reliable partners in a discussion that shapes actions for a radical goal."

This is not a new relationship. Back in 2023, ENoLL's recommendations on using Living Labs for Zero Pollution were formally endorsed by the Stakeholder Platform. Now we get to take that work further, on PFAS, soil, water and air protection, clean value chains and citizens' rights.

If your Living Lab is doing work in any of these areas, this is your moment too. What would you want the European Commission to hear about your work on pollution?

Read the 2023 recommendations here: https://enoll.pulse.ly/uh11vemnbs

We put a lot of care into every edition of Living Labs Pulse, and it shows most in the small things: the spotlight someone didn't expect to see, the open call that landed at exactly the right moment, the training announcement that answered a question someone had been sitting with for weeks.

Our latest edition, the OLLD26 Special, was all about OpenLivingLab Days this September in Brussels and Antwerp. Before the full programme even went live, subscribers already knew what to expect.

That's really what this newsletter is for. Not a broadcast, just a way of staying close to what's happening: project news, Academy courses, funding opportunities, policy updates, and the everyday work people are doing.

If you'd like it landing in your inbox, subscribing takes a minute: https://sibforms.pulse.ly/um5lk1hfi0
What's one thing you'd love to see more of in a newsletter like this? Tell us in the comments, we're always building the next edition with you in mind.

At OLLD24 In Timisoara and in last year’s edition in Andorra, a few OLLD attendees picked up guitars and turned the social dinner into something nobody expected: a proper gig, played by the people who'd spent the whole day talking about Living Labs.

We want to do that again in Antwerp. The ENoLL Band is looking for a guitarist or keyboard player to join us on stage at the OLLD26 social dinner on 30 September.

You don't have to be a professional musician. You just need to enjoy playing with others and want to be part of something a bit different at this year's OLLD. There's one rehearsal before the show, and you'll need to be registered for OLLD26.

If this sounds like you, send an email to [email protected] with the subject line "ENoLL Band Application - [Your Name]" and a few words about yourself. Applications close on 10 August 2026 at 23:59 CEST.

More details and the full call here: https://openlivinglabdays.pulse.ly/xhkbpdyjh0

Who's picking up an instrument this year?

Three days. Barcelona. Thousands of people who spend their working lives trying to make cities better places to live.

That is Smart City Expo World Congress, running from 3 to 5 November 2026, and ENoLL is back as an event partner this year. This year's theme is Urban Solutions, Real Impact, a reminder that most of the answers to our urban problems already exist somewhere, in a pilot project, a research lab or a community initiative. The hard part is building the bridge between having an idea and actually delivering it, and that is what SCEWC is built around.

The event has grown into the world's biggest gathering on urban innovation since it started in 2011, and the 2026 edition is expected to welcome more than 27,000 professional visitors from 138 countries, plus co-located events covering mobility, building and the blue economy.

Because we are a partner this year, we have a batch of free tickets set aside just for ENoLL Members, first come, first served.

Full details and how to request yours: https://enoll.org/2026/06/30/enoll-and-smart-city-expo-world-congress-2026-free-tickets-for-enoll-members/

Has your Living Lab been to Smart City Expo before?