CEE Community LAB

About

The CEE Community LAB is an action-oriented network and co-creation ‘LAB’ that brings people together – from the public and private sectors – to address climate change challenges in central and Eastern Europe (CEE).

The LAB aims to build the trust, capacity and cross-sectoral collaborations that are needed to trigger transformative, systemic change. Collaborations will address priority areas for the region, including retrofit, smart agriculture, re-industrialisation and other significant sectors in CEE.

Kicked off and supported by EIT Climate-KIC, the CEE Community LAB will offer entry into a pan-European knowledge and innovation community of ‘systems innovators’, while focusing on local challenges.

By offering tools, approaches and a wide network for tackling place-based challenges in a systemic way, the CEE Community LAB aims to test different options for accelerating climate adaptation and resilience, while bringing benefits tailored to local people.
A key value add of a systems innovation approach is that it offers a platform and techniques for collaboration, including ways to:

establish common intent and interest amongst business and government ‘challenge owners’, researchers, educators and citizen groups
systems mapping across multiple systems, to understand and leverage interdependencies
a way to build a case for collaborative intervention and investment based on ‘systems value’, to help drive systemic change
a way to recruit new collaborators into joined-up missions, and manage relationships, community engagement and results generation in a coherent way
simplification of operations and financial sustainability

Three overarching challenges have been identified for 2020:

Stream 1: Unlocking new ways of thinking and increasing impact – Innovations and experiments that address systemic blockages to climate action in CEE. Projects include policy experimentation, futures literacy, foresight and social simulations.

Stream 2: Addressing lack of collaboration and low level of trust in the region – Experiments that engage citizens, NGO, designers, businesses, and public authorities in collaborative projects, to build the trust and networks needed to tackle climate emergency collectively. Projects will employ co-creative methods, ideation, and social simulations.

Stream 3: Financial innovations addressing climate emergency – Experiments leading to the creation of financial innovations and a finance community- focused on tackling the climate emergency in CEE.

These three streams are being managed by the partners who co-create the Community LAB with EIT Climate-KIC: Cleantech ForEst, Impact Hub, Ashoka, 4CF Strategic Foresight, Centre for Systems Solutions.