Solutions Lab
The Solutions Lab (SLab) is a public sector social innovation lab inside the City of Vancouver, Canada that started in late 2016.
SLab is inspired by, and contributes to, the current proliferation of innovation units inside governments around the globe. SLab brings people together in co-creative and experimental processes to seek transformative solutions to some of the most complex challenges facing Vancouver.
How We Work
This graphic describes the key ingredients of our theory of change.
We focus our work in five policy domains: Reconciliation; Equity; Healthy City; Greenest City; and Climate Emergency.
Our contributions to change include: building innovation infrastructure; unlocking the potential of people; growing authentic and high-impact collaboration; shifting organizational culture; and telling our stories of change.
We have two main activities: lab processes that focus on complex challenges; and communities of practice that focus on building capacities, competencies, and connections.
The core competencies that we are building, informed by the theories that guide our understanding of how change happens, include:
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Social Innovation
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Strategic + Systemic Design
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Experimental Governance
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Decolonization + Equity
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Developmental Evaluation
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Transformative Learning