Social Labs
"We have been successful in co-sensing local needs & capabilities through the social lab approach. By social labs, we mean platforms for addressing complex social challenges"
-DR. ELMER SORIANO, Executive Director of IGS, and the Adviser of #DFCHacks focusing on Inclusive Growth and Recovery in Asia. Social labs have three core characteristics: social, experimental and systemic
They are social. Social labs start by bringing together diverse participants to work in a team that acts collectively. They are ideally drawn from different sectors of society. The active participation of diverse stakeholders represents the social nature of social labs.
They are experimental. Social labs are not one-off experiences. They’re ongoing and sustained efforts. The team doing the work takes an iterative approach to the challenges it wants to address, prototyping interventions and managing a portfolio of promising solutions.
They are systemic. The ideas and initiatives developed in social labs—and released as prototypes—aspire to be systemic in nature. This means trying to come up with solutions that go beyond dealing with a part of the whole or symptoms of the problem and address the root cause of why things are not working in the first place.