They needed to decide what to build before building it.Lab’O was still being created, which meant there were no existing services to improve. The challenge was to define what the accelerator should offer and validate those ideas with the people who would actually use them.
The team needed to understand who would use the accelerator, what they were trying to achieve and where they struggled.
Those insights had to become concrete services the accelerator could realistically offer.
The team needed evidence to decide what to build, refine or drop before committing time and budget.
Worked as part of a service design team, across two phases — first generate ideas, then test them with the people who’d actually use the place.
The event that brought the accelerator’s future residents in before the place even existed.
The living lab event — residents working through the sessions.
No screens here — the workshops and filled-in templates are the proof.
Residents built their own personas — surfacing who they are: their relationship to the territory, how they collaborate, their ideal work environment, their professional history, and the story of their startup.
Residents placed themselves on a timeline of startup development stages to show where they are now — and for each stage they’d been through, captured the needs and difficulties they faced.
The service ideas from the design sprint, presented as storyboards, with residents’ reactions to each captured — testing the concepts against the people who’d actually use them.
A wider set of lighter service ideas on cards; residents picked the ones that appealed, said why, and dropped them in a box — fast feedback across many options at once.
Grounded in feedback from the accelerator’s actual future residents, the living lab let the team decide which services to build and which to drop, refine others from real input, validate the ideas that held up — and surface needs, and services, no one had thought of. Lab’O moved forward on a service offer shaped by the people who’d actually use it, rather than by assumption.
