Last Thursday, 4 June, ENoLL was honoured to be part of the EIC Summit 2026 in Brussels. We were present in the new EUnicorner, a dedicated space within the EIC Pavilion at Tour & Taxis that brought learning and networking together on the exhibition floor.
ENoLL’s Director, Martina Desole, delivered a fifteen-minute session titled “Living Labs as a competitive advantage for European companies: transforming the innovation journey from a high-risk gamble into a structured, evidence-based path to market.” The session drew a crowd of investors, startups, innovators, European Commission officials, and national contact points, all gathered in that open space on the exhibition floor.
The innovation journey is expensive, uncertain, and often disconnected from the real-world contexts in which solutions need to work. Companies invest heavily in developing products and services, only to find that they do not perform as expected once they reach actual users, in actual environments.
The question Martina addressed at the EIC Summit is one that ENoLL hears consistently across sectors and geographies: how do you transform the innovation journey from a high-risk gamble into a structured, evidence-based path to market?
The answer is not another funding mechanism. It is Living Labs.
Living Labs are user-centred, open innovation ecosystems where research and innovation unfold in real-life environments. By placing citizens and end-users at the centre of the process, they ensure that solutions are tested and validated in the conditions they were built for, before reaching the market.
At the EIC Summit, Martina presented a model that makes this approach directly accessible to companies of any size: Living Lab as a service.
As Martina put it: “What we presented is Living Lab as a service for industry. Companies can now post their challenge directly on ACCELUP and hire a certified Living Lab. The innovation journey doesn’t have to be a high-risk gamble. It can be a structured, evidence-based path to market.”
ACCELUP is ENoLL’s dedicated matchmaking platform, designed to connect companies and innovators with ENoLL-certified Living Labs for real-world testing and co-creation.
The process is straightforward:
This model makes Living Lab infrastructure available on demand, opening up access to co-creation and real-world validation for companies that may not have an existing relationship with a Living Lab.
ENoLL’s network of 200 active Members across 45 countries means that companies working with ACCELUP can access Living Lab expertise across a wide range of sectors, geographies, and innovation contexts.
The EIC Summit 2026 itself was full of energy. The Scale-Up Fund, the Women Innovators Award, and new opportunities for European startups and scaleups were among the highlights of an event that brought together some of the most active voices in European innovation. A reminder of what European innovation looks like when it works towards something bigger than itself.
ENoLL’s presence at the EUnicorner reflects a broader commitment to putting Living Lab methodology at the centre of conversations about how Europe scales its most promising innovations, not as a research add-on, but as core competitive infrastructure for industry.
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