Transitions Labs

About

The Transitions Labs will be established in different localities, involving dedicated stakeholders that will organize a series of activities and workshops structured around the entire value chain and the circular economy.
In the Transitions Labs, participants will practice and learn by exercising the knowledge, tools and skills established in the previous points to generate innovation from a purpose or the resolution of a real problem. The Transitions Labs will be associated with multidisciplinary teams made up of creatives, technicians, designers, engineers and company managers, innovation managers or product managers, coming from various local organizations.

Transitions Labs are defined as:

• Laboratories for supporting transitions towards sustainability and digitalization in F&T
• Playgrounds for experimenting with the modular curricula based on the Loopholes Cards and the Kaospilot methodology.
• Cooperations between vocational training, professionals and higher education institutions
• A space for grounding circular projects, appropriating local realities, emerging
  innovative concepts and fostering territorial policies related to innovative education in T&F.

Transitions Labs Values

• Context-based: Transitions labs will be based on real challenges faced by
  stakeholders
• Active learning: Transitions Lab will position learners in an active posture, working with projects and peer-learning, using prototyping a product, service, or system level, as a learning lens for accelerating innovation
• Cooperative: Labs will be a place of collaboration between different stakeholders, from students, companies, and entrepreneurs to local associations, and public bodies.
• Circular: all labs will work to enable circular transitions.
• Openness: Labs will work with an open source philosophy and share their work widely so as to contribute to the improvement of the Transitions curriculum

Transitions Labs Configurations

Transitions Labs are composed by:

• A coordination node composed by one or several partners
• Challenges identified with local partners, with associated target groups
• A selected program of activities based on learning arches developed in Transitions
• Teacher network and external partners involved in content provision

Four different types of Transitions Lab configurations were imagined by the partners according to their perimeter of intervention and the type of organizations involved in the implementation.

• Company Transitions Lab: one company wants to foster transitions internally and will create a transition lab that tackles their own challenges. Targets are the staff and extended ecosystems in which the company is acting.
• Educational Transitions Labs: One educational center (VET, HEI) is setting up a Transition Lab fostering cooperation between their students and their ecosystems of stakeholders (teachers, companies, local associations, public institutions, other schools…)
• Territorial Transitions Labs: Several organizations, regional clusters in the same territory are collaborating to foster transitions in their own context. They identify together a series of challenges and define a joint program of activities involving relevant targets, from students, companies, citizens…
• International Transitions Labs: Partners across countries jointly collaborate to build knowledge and organize (open) events to foster transitions in the T & F sector.

Transitions Labs Impact

Transitions Labs will impact at four levels:

• Individual level: Transitions Labs will support individual learnings and innovative experiences towards enabling them as change agents.
• Challenge level: Transitions Labs will tackle real challenges and co-develop solutions at product, service and/or system level.
• Organizational level: Transitions Labs will help training leaders to better design future paths for their curricula in T&F
• Transition project/Network level: Transitions Labs will provide empirical data and knowledge that will consolidate the Transitions Networks and related activities.