Co-Creation Cafés: Building Living Lab Capacity Across Regions

Living labs as spaces for shared learning

The living lab approach in HYBES has helped stakeholders actively engage with complex energy and decarbonisation challenges. Rather than transferring solutions from one place to another, the emphasis has been on learning together, recognising local context while exploring what can be adapted and transferred between regions.

This approach has supported stakeholders in evolving their practices while strengthening collaboration between partner regions. Designed as an adaptable and replicable engagement platform, the cafés created interactive spaces for:

• Stakeholder dialogue
• Transnational and mutual learning
• Co-exploration of locally embedded energy challenges and opportunities

The format relied on experiential exchange, light-touch facilitation, and strong participant ownership. A distinctive feature was the use of thematic “twinning”, where two partner regions collaborated around a shared theme. This proved especially effective in building mutual understanding and surfacing insights that could inform transferable practices, while respecting regional differences.

A success story rooted in capacity building

The Co-Creation Cafés directly responded to early HYBES recommendations to strengthen:

• Capacity building
• Mutual learning and knowledge sharing
• The use of virtual spaces to exchange experience and best practices

Partners presented their work with local schools, neighbourhoods, and districts, and these presentations were recorded to create additional resources for a growing community of practice using living lab approaches.

The café themes reflected shared objectives, including:

• Engaging with education
• Mobilising solar energy opportunities
• Exploring district energy planning approaches

One café also featured an external speaker from an established Energy Living Lab and a member of the ENOLL Energy Working Group, opening new opportunities to strengthen connections with wider European living lab networks.

Insights and surprises

A key learning from HYBES has been the clear need for further capacity-building and training to support actors engaged in living lab approaches. Partners also recognised the challenge of learning from each other’s best practices in ways that account for the nuances of very different local contexts.

The Co-Creation Cafés proved particularly successful in addressing this challenge, enabling targeted deep dives into thematic areas and helping partners explore opportunities for mutual learning, scaling, and adaptation between regions.

Building on this experience, University College Cork plans to develop a Co-Creation Café tool for wider dissemination. There are also plans to continue exploring targeted brokering and matchmaking between regions, supporting deeper collaboration and knowledge exchange beyond the lifetime of the HYBES project.

Based on their experience, the team recommends that new transnational capacity-building projects:

• Twin partners around shared themes and interests.
• Focus on targeted, in-depth knowledge exchange rather than broad comparisons.

The HYBES experience shows that well-designed co-creation spaces can play a powerful role in supporting learning, trust, and collaboration across borders—key ingredients for successful decarbonisation efforts.