Tackling wicked problems: the case of Living Labs

Over the last years, wicked problems have received increasing attention, fostering the search for creative ways of tackling with high uncertainty and complexity. As a consequence, new substantive and procedural policy instruments have been designed and experimented, including behavioral science-based tools and new forms of collaborative or networked policy making. Among these, so called ‘Living labs’ have been spreading in many European countries to address complex problems such as sustainable growth, innovation, digitalization, IoT, aging society, food consumptions, and healthcare, also thanks to the impulse given by the European Commission from the Sixth Framework Program on. Although several case studies and some comparative analyses exist in the literature, the nature of this new policy instrument and its characteristics in relation to more traditional instruments have not yet been properly analyzed and discussed. This paper aims at making a step forward in this direction through an extensive analysis on a medium-N sample of Living labs selected from the European Network of Living Labs (ENOLL). This highly inductive theoretical analysis will serve not only to better understand the intrinsic qualities of this new policy instrument and the peculiar mechanisms it is expected to trigger, but also its potential and its pitfalls in terms of overall capacity of politico-administrative systems to cope with wicked problems.