Innovation Case Study: Living Labs
Casey City Council
Collaborative Problem-solving Through Place-based Experimentation and Innovation
A Living Lab brings together diverse stakeholders — government, academia, businesses, and the community — to trial innovative solutions that address complex problems. The Circular Economy Living Lab was delivered in 2023, Future Mobility Living Lab in 2024, and Climate Action Living Lab in 2025. The Playbook was published in 2024 to support the adoption of this approach by other councils and organisations.
2025 MAVlab Innovation Awards Winner
The Sandbox Award for Experimentation Practice, supported by Breakthrough Victoria
Project statistics:
- Each Living Lab has a team of 1 internal staff member (Innovation Advisor) and 4-8 external partners.
- The Playbook was developed by 1 internal staff member with an external consultant supporting for the graphic design (Delos Delta).
- Each Living Lab runs for 2 - 2.5 years:
- Phase 1: Initiating & Co-designing (6 months)
- Phase 2: Exploring (3 months)
- Phase 3: Experimenting (6-12 months)
- Phase 4: Evaluating (3 months)
- Phase 5: Scaling Up & Thought Leadership (6 months).
Project goals:
- The primary goal of a Living Lab is to respond to complex challenges by testing and validating innovative solutions that meet the needs of the community.
Challenge and context:
Local governments face complex social, environmental, and economic challenges. Responsible for managing vital infrastructure, delivering essential services, and fostering community wellbeing, councils are increasingly navigating the impacts of a changing climate and evolving community expectations, all within constrained financial environments.
Finding effective, locally relevant solutions requires innovative and collaborative approaches that move beyond traditional planning cycles. The City of Casey has embraced one such approach: a Living Lab.
Each Living Lab addresses complex challenges through a strategically aligned theme:
- Circular Economy Living Lab: A rapidly growing population affects the natural environment, making efficient waste management and resource use critical to the city’s environmental resilience. Council seeks to ensure sustainable growth while creating future opportunities for the local economy, recognising the role of a circular economy in this transition. A key objective in Casey's Environment Strategy is to contribute to a circular economy through effective waste management and resource recovery.
- Future Mobility Living Lab: With a steadily increasing residential population, transport challenges continue to grow, including safety and sustainability concerns. To improve future mobility, Council focuses on safe and efficient transport networks, sustainable infrastructure, and enhanced community wellbeing. This aligns with the vision of the Smart Casey Launchpad for a future-ready, resilient community.
- Climate Action Living Lab: Climate change is increasingly threatening communities, infrastructure, and biodiversity across the City of Casey. Rising global temperatures are resulting in more intense and frequent heatwaves, storms, and bushfires, along with long-term impacts such as reduced rainfall and rising sea levels. The City of Casey is committed to addressing climate change through initiatives outlined in the Council Plan, Environment Strategy, and Climate Action Plan.
Innovation and solution:
A Living Lab trials new solutions on a small scale, allowing for rapid iteration before potentially scaling successful approaches.
There are three key components to a Living Lab:
- Problem: Living Labs address multifaceted issues with significant implications for the community, economy, and environment.
- People: The model brings together diverse stakeholders — government, academia, industry, entrepreneurs, and the community — to foster collaboration and knowledge sharing. End-users, such as residents, businesses, and community groups, are active participants rather than passive subjects. They help define problems, co-design solutions to ensure accessibility and inclusivity, provide feedback, and evaluate outcomes.
- Place: Experiments and trials occur in real-life contexts — neighbourhoods, public spaces, and businesses — rather than controlled laboratory environments. This ensures solutions are tested under genuine conditions and face real-world complexities.
Living Labs aim to tackle “wicked problems” — complex, interconnected challenges that often lack straightforward solutions. Traditional top-down approaches can struggle to address the local nuances and diverse impacts of these issues. The Living Lab model offers several key advantages:
- Adaptability and local relevance: Testing solutions in situ with community involvement ensures interventions are tailored to local needs and conditions.
- Reduced risk: Small-scale trials allow councils to experiment with innovative, unproven ideas without committing significant resources upfront. Failures become learning opportunities rather than costly mistakes.
- Fostering innovation: Collaborative environments bring together diverse perspectives and expertise, sparking creative solutions that might not emerge in siloed approaches.
- Building buy-in and capacity: Direct engagement with the community and stakeholders fosters understanding, acceptance, and ownership of actions, while building local capacity to adapt to challenges.
- Generating real-world evidence: Insights from trials provide data to inform future policy decisions, strategic planning, and larger-scale investments.
The success of these Labs demonstrates the power of the model to tackle diverse, complex local government challenges. They highlight the value of real-world testing, stakeholder collaboration, and iterative learning in developing effective, community-centred solutions.
Impact and outcomes:
Council has delivered three Living Labs since 2023, generating positive social and environmental impacts:
- Circular Economy Living Lab: Accelerated the transition to a circular economy within the municipality by reducing food waste, minimising construction and demolition waste, and improving building maintenance. This Lab provided tangible evidence of community interest in waste reduction and reuse, and informed the review of Council's asset disposal policy.
- Future Mobility Living Lab: Explored safe and sustainable transport solutions for the growing municipality. This Lab enhanced pedestrian safety in school zones and investigated eco-friendly alternatives for materials used in street paving. The trials provided valuable insights into safe and sustainable ways for residents to move around the City, informing Council's road safety and infrastructure initiatives.
- Climate Action Living Lab: Focused on enhancing climate resilience for the local community and environment. This Lab aims to empower youth through climate education, boost native habitat and biodiversity, improve community safety, and increase renewable energy adoption.
Qualitative and quantitative data were collected by Lab partners during the trials to evaluate the extent to which their solutions achieved the desired outcomes.
Casey’s Living Lab model has also provided significant learnings, shared via the Living Lab Playbook:
- Embrace experimentation: Trial new ideas on a small, manageable scale.
- Harness collaboration: Complex problems require diverse perspectives.
- Centre the community: Involve the community throughout the process to ensure accessibility and inclusion.
- Learn iteratively: View trials, even unsuccessful ones, as learning opportunities.
- Connect to strategy: Ensure Living Lab activities align with broader Council strategic plans to maximise impact and justify investment.
The success of these Labs demonstrates the power of the model to tackle diverse, complex local government challenges. They highlight the value of real-world testing, stakeholder collaboration, and iterative learning in developing effective, community-centred solutions.
Scalability:
The final phase of a Living Lab focuses on scaling-up and thought leadership.
During this phase for each of Casey’s Living Labs, Council explored expanding successful trials to a larger scale to deliver broader community impact, and shared trial insights via public reports to allow others to learn from successes and challenges. Each Living Lab has built on the learnings of previous Labs, refining the model with each iteration. Key improvements have included:
- Prioritising community engagement to ensure genuine co-design.
- Extending trial duration from six to twelve months to allow sufficient time to realise benefits and collect robust evaluation data.
- Opening theme selection beyond the Innovation team, enabling other internal teams to submit Expressions of Interest (EOI) and receive support from the Innovation team as process experts to deliver the Living Lab.
After three Living Labs and many lessons learned, this knowledge was condensed into a Living Lab Playbook—a practical, step-by-step guide designed to help other councils and organisations run their own Living Labs.
Living Labs can help councils contribute to the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), promoting sustainable practices and driving systemic change. For example, they can support:
- SDG 11: Sustainable Cities and Communities
- SDG 9: Industry, Innovation, and Infrastructure
- SDG 17: Partnerships for the Goals.
In Casey, the Living Labs have directly contributed to SDGs by addressing local challenges such as climate resilience, renewable energy adoption, and waste reduction. Casey’s Living Labs demonstrate how the model can cultivate local solutions, engage the community, and accelerate progress toward a more sustainable and resilient future. The journey, including the project trials, offers a valuable case study for councils nationwide seeking to turn ambition into tangible action.