A Regional Approach to Delivering and Evaluating Living Labs

Keywords: Regional, evaluation, evidence, efficiency, collaboration

“A major challenge in developing inclusive and impactful living labs in diverse conurbations is co-ordinating a cohesive and coherent approach at regional levels. A lack of a co-ordinated approach can lead to regional inequalities in provision and opportunity for participants, as well as inefficiencies on the part of the providers, including the duplication of services and poor economies of scale in delivery.
These challenges are exacerbated when there are high levels of transience, mobility and diversity in the areas, but also when there is a history of competition and non-collaboration between local stakeholders in both receiving funding and delivering related projects.
The MiFriendly Cities programme was a 3 year initiative in the UK which aimed at developing innovative, community-led and sustainable approaches to enhancing the contribution of refugees and migrants across the region. This was funded in October 2017 by the European Union’s Urban Innovation Fund. The programme represented a landmark intervention in terms of scale and breadth with regards to what has been previously attempted in both the UK and the EU.
MiFriendly Cities encouraged a collaborative approach to developing, testing and refining a regional living lab approach to strategically working with migrant and refugee groups in the area. Throughout the programme, an independent evaluation team worked with all partners using a mixed methods approach that was underpinned by a co-developed Theory of Change logic model. The aim here was to produce an evidence base for success and innovation in the programme, as well to document the testing of ideas, practices and projects which did not work well and which others in the future can learn from.
Central to the Theory of Change model for MiFriendly Cities was a strand of delivery centred around partnership working by regional actors. The endgame of programme delivery and aspiration in relation to this strand is that approaches to migrant integration change for the better and that the volume, quality and efficacy of migrant support increases across the 3 cities. Here living lab approaches such as citizen social science, refugee and migrant led journalism and locally tailored English language provision were core outcomes.
The evaluation demonstrated that local and regional leaders in migrant support and engagement sharing their learning and expertise lead to benefits for all partners and that as individual organisations, and as a collective, that their capabilities were enhanced and that their work becomes more collaborative, impactful and efficient over time. The evaluation also allowed for the testing of different models of delivery across the 3 cities to empirically study their impact, efficiency and legacy in order to inform future provision.
The lessons learned from MiFriendly Cities are of interest to practitioners and the public because they give a unique insight into the co-ordinated regional delivery of a living labs approach to refugee and migrant integration. The documenting and understanding of the lessons learned here, both positive and negative, can, and should inform future delivery of similar programmes and makes a case for scaled up, regional models of award and delivery.”