Les Labonautes

Over the past fifteen years or so, many local authorities and government bodies have decided to set up innovation labs – the 27th Region itself contributed to this by launching the La Transfo programme (2011–2020). However, there is often a gap between the stated ambitions for transformation and the reality on the ground.

The Les Labonautes programme sets out to explore what the future of these labs might look like if they pursued more ambitious goals – such as the ecological transition, social justice or regional resilience – if they were more collaborative, for example in delivering ‘seamless’ public services, and if they adopted more rigorous transformation strategies and methods.

The aim is to provide a methodological framework to help public innovation labs and their ecosystem to better (re)define their positioning, values, objectives, operating practices, governance and action framework, and working tools, and to develop their own theory of change and evaluation criteria.

Les Labonautes took the form of a series of workshops, designed and run collaboratively from January 2022 to early 2023 by around thirty participants: public sector staff responsible for running innovation labs, consultants and project management support professionals, researchers, and others. Their outputs were discussed with a 'mirror' group and then widely shared with the entire public innovation community.Les Labonautes was designed as an iterative inquiry, in which the topics to be addressed emerged as the process unfolded, centred on three key areas:

• Reducing the risk of the depoliticisation of public innovation: how can we better understand the phenomena of the depoliticisation of public innovation? How can we deconstruct dominant paradigms to open up new scope for manoeuvre? How can we better integrate the issues of inclusion, social justice and the fight against the ecological crisis?
• Opening up the labs: how can we build new alliances and give greater meaning to existing collaborations? How can we create R&D mechanisms and ecosystems?
• Equipping the labs: how can we strengthen the labs using new models for managing complexity, broaden their theoretical and practical knowledge, and apply transformation and evaluation tools more rigorously?

Les Labonautes was coordinated by the 27th Region, TiLab and the DITP. It was funded as part of the State and Regions' Digital Transformation Recovery Plan.

Participants in Les Labonautes: the DITP (Paris), TiLab (Rennes), La Base (Bordeaux), Le Lab AH (Paris), La Fabrique à Projets (Paris), the SUD Region's innovation laboratory (Marseille), the University of Paris-Est Créteil, the School of Advanced Studies in Public Health (Rennes), the innovation missions of Val d'Oise (Cergy) and Loire-Atlantique (Nantes), the GRRR agency (Nantes), Nuunat (Lyon), Ellyx (Paris-Lyon-Bordeaux-Poitiers), Itinéraire Bis (Paris), and Emmanuel Bodinier (Grenoble).

The programme was carried out in partnership with the University of British Columbia in Vancouver (Canada), as part of an action research project launched in 2018 by Lindsay Cole, head of the City of Vancouver's Innovation Lab (Canada), and the "Transforming Cities" network.