Living Laboratory
Real-World Innovation in Action
Theory meets practice in the living laboratory—where innovation frameworks are tested, refined, and validated through real-world application.
The Laboratory Approach
Innovation can’t be understood purely through abstract concepts—it must be experienced, experimented with, and evolved through practice. The living laboratory approach treats every engagement as an opportunity to test ideas, gather insights, and advance our collective understanding of how innovation really works.
Innovatrium
Founded in 2004, Innovatrium is Jeff’s physical and intellectual innovation lab—a joint venture with Haworth focused on creating global innovation impact. It operates as a living laboratory where organizations experiment with innovation culture, capability, and community.
The Innovatrium is the practical manifestation of Jeff’s school of thought—a physical space where diverse perspectives clash productively to generate new solutions. Organizations use it for workshops, strategic planning, innovation sprints, and experiential learning.
Fortune 500 Laboratory
Large enterprises provide a critical proving ground for understanding how innovation systems function at scale. Across industries with differing regulatory, technological, and cultural constraints, these environments reveal how innovation frameworks perform when complexity, coordination, and long time horizons are unavoidable.
Within this laboratory, innovation is examined not as a set of isolated initiatives, but as an organizational system—shaped by leadership decisions, competing priorities, and institutional design. These contexts help surface where innovation efforts stall, where they accelerate, and how organizations can balance discipline and adaptability over time.
Industries represented in this work include:
- Technology and digital platforms
- Healthcare and life sciences
- Consumer products and global brands
- Aerospace and advanced engineering
- Financial services and other highly regulated industries
Together, these environments function as an ongoing laboratory for refining how innovation operates in complex, high-scale organizations.
Defense & Military Laboratory
Defense and military contexts introduce forms of complexity that rarely appear elsewhere: layered command structures, extreme coordination requirements, and decisions made across compressed and extended time horizons simultaneously. These conditions expose how innovation frameworks behave when alignment, learning, and execution must occur across large, distributed systems.
Within this laboratory, attention centers on how organizations interpret signals, adjust structures, and evolve practices without disrupting operational integrity. Rather than focusing on specific missions or technologies, this work examines how innovation can be cultivated in environments where reliability, discipline, and adaptability must coexist.
Engagements across defense and allied institutions—including NATO contexts—provide ongoing insight into how innovation systems develop under constraint, informing the continued refinement of frameworks intended to operate across diverse institutional settings.
Jeff’s contributions in this domain have been recognized internationally, including the Władysław Eugeniusz Sikorski Medal awarded by the Polish Armed Forces (2024).
The University Laboratory
University environments provide a uniquely demanding laboratory for innovation frameworks because learning, experimentation, and evaluation occur simultaneously. Within this setting, ideas must hold up not only in practice, but in explanation—making assumptions visible and logic defensible across disciplines and experience levels.
At the Ross School of Business, classrooms and executive programs function as iterative testing environments where innovation frameworks are examined, challenged, and refined through live problem-solving rather than hypothetical cases. Students and executives engage with real organizational tensions, allowing the work to evolve through repeated cycles of application, reflection, and adjustment.
This laboratory emphasizes innovation as a learnable, teachable system—revealing how frameworks translate across career stages, industries, and institutional contexts, and informing how innovation education itself must adapt over time.
Current Experiments
The living laboratory remains active as conditions for innovation continue to evolve. Current areas of exploration focus on how organizations develop the capacity to interpret change, adapt intelligently, and sustain innovation across shifting contexts.
AI-Augmented Innovation
Exploring how artificial intelligence tools influence sensemaking, decision quality, and the distribution of creative work
Adaptive Intelligence
Examining how innovation systems learn over time—integrating human judgment, organizational design, and emerging technologies to respond effectively under uncertainty
Remote Innovation
Investigating how innovation systems function when collaboration, experimentation, and leadership occur across distance
Cross-Sector Innovation
Studying how practices translate—and fail to translate—across corporate, public, academic, and defense contexts
Defense Innovation
Extending and testing innovation frameworks in environments defined by constraint, coordination, and consequence
Sustainability & Innovation
Understanding how environmental constraints reshape innovation priorities, trade-offs, and time horizons
Laboratory Outcomes
The living laboratory has generated:
- The Competing Values Framework (with Quinn, Cameron, Rohrbaugh)
- Innovation Genome™ methodology
- Innovation Code™ tools and practices
- The Paradox Cycle framework
- Role-based innovation typology (Artist, Engineer, Athlete, Sage)
- Certified Professional Innovator Program
- Hundreds of case studies across industries
- Refined frameworks for military and defense innovation