Our aim
Fast Forward Foundation’s Open Lab is a first of its kind and is best thought of as a social innovation research facility.
Its aim is to help find out what actually works in the innovation of welfare systems.
People and organizations from the public, private and non-profit sectors and from different European countries – our partners – meet in the Lab to craft and test shared solutions to welfare’s toughest problems. For each problem we decide to address we create a dedicated “research community”, a small network where partners who would not otherwise have a chance to meet can work together with the help of the best relevant expertise and with a rigorous facilitation methodology.
Through a series of co-design workshops, taking into account on the opportunities and constraints of each sector, we devise an integrated welfare solution and an experimental design to test it.
We then run a test on a small scale for enough time to see if the solution actually works in the real world. If it does, the partners can scale it up. If it doesn’t, we will all have learnt a valuable lesson to improve the project.
Innovation catalyst
Fast Forward Foundation provides its methodology, scientific advisors and project team.
Our scientific advisors have solid academic expertise, extensive practical experience in healthcare, social protection, social assistance, and digital payments for financial inclusion, and useful networks in their respective fields.
Our project team find and select the partners, program and manage the whole research process, and make sure that the partner’s efforts are focused on finding an effective solution in the fastest reasonable time frame.
The Foundation acts as a catalyst: we choose the problem, convene the partners, accelerate their collaboration, and make sure that the solution is in the public interest.