This Workstream recognises the needs expressed by the European Living Lab community, as well as by the EC mandate for the creation of the Hub, and aims at increasing sharing and communication between Living Labs and empowering Living Labs to tackle societal challenges.  

Activites are progressed by the "Community of Practice, Advocacy and Communication" Work Group.

The focus of this work group reflects the need for focused sharing, learning and training interventions to showcase good practices between the Living Lab members and to facilitate capacity for knowledge transfer between participants.

Currently, the European Higher Education Living Lab ecosystem displays a high level of fragmentation and lack of communication between Living Lab initiatives. In many cases these Living Labs face similar challenges and constraints and are focusing on similar areas of intervention. At a European scale, the lack of communication between them gives rise to inefficiency, failures in information-transfer failure, waste and costs and duplicated effort.  

This group is also focused on the need to empower the European Higher Education Living Lab community through communication and advocacy, both from a policy standpoint and in publicising individual Living Lab initiatives to a larger and more diverse audience.  

In many cases individual Living Lab experience a lack of resources and/or the critical mass to ensure that their needs, concerns and voices can reach and be valorised at the highest levels of authority in the decision-making apparatus of European Higher Education.

Recognising this shortcoming, this Work Group is exploring the coordination of the member Living Labs and how to leverage their critical mass to achieve changes at the highest level of policy decision. Leveraging the combined efforts of all the member will also aid in publicizing both the ELLH and its members, strengthening visibility and opportunity to attract and interact with external stakeholders. Additionally, the work group will consider knowledge sharing between members on Living Lab methodologies, identifying opportunities to support the developing Community of Practice.

Work Group 1 is cooperatively exploring challenges such as:   

• How might we, as a network, better share knowledge, tools, methods and practices?   

• How might cooperative activities support collective capacity by way of accelerating take up, scaling or replicating solutions; reducing duplicate efforts; building an eco-system for better peer to peer exchange?  

• How can European Living Labs in Higher Education coordinate their efforts and voices to advocate for necessary change to high-level institutional players in European Higher Educaiton?  

• What activities and actions can the ELLH pursue to help its members in transfer knowledge as well as to promote the Hub to a wider audience?