Labs
The
innovation
engine .
A Lab is our full service offering: a dedicated space for experimentation inside your organisation, designed, launched and run alongside your team.
What is a Lab?
A focal point. A team. A way of working.
A Lab is where innovation stops being a project and starts being a practice. The team, the method and the tools, in one place.
Built on three pillars that compound.
Playbook
A consistent framework for framing problems, exploring context, designing experiments and making decisions grounded in evidence. Validated across many engagements, applied to whatever is in front of you.
Platform
Bespoke software that captures, surfaces and connects research and learning. Configured to each Lab and available only inside one. From assumptions to insights, from what you think to what you know.
People
Practitioners who have done this work before, embedded alongside yours. Coaching, challenging and enabling, never sitting above.
Same method. Every Lab different.
The Playbook is the constant. Your team, your problem and your context decide everything else.
We don't always start at the beginning. We meet teams where they are, whether that's a half-formed hypothesis, a fresh policy area, a product in flight, or a portfolio under review.
Our people flex around yours. Sometimes we embed; sometimes we sit one step back and coach. Sometimes the team is mostly yours, with us bringing method and challenge. Sometimes we take the whole thing and work at a distance, so your team can stay focused on delivery until the Lab has something to bring back.
The rhythm follows the problem, weekly sprints, monthly heartbeats, or something between, and the governance sits inside your existing structures, producing evidence in formats your decision-makers already recognise.
Some Labs are short and sharp: a specific question, a clear answer. Others run longer when the ambition is broader, and our role shifts over time from leading, to supporting, to stepping back entirely.
"Lighthouse's capacity to listen, interpret and translate academic insight, and how they've worked alongside us following the innovation playbook, has transformed how we now work to help UK Government to improve energy, housing and social policy."
Prof. Mark Davis
Professor of Economic Sociology, University of Leeds, and 2025 President of Sociology & Social Policy, British Science Association
“Lighthouse have enabled us to think outside of our policy area, understand the complexity of the portfolio and where it fits within the wider system.”
Kate Haseler-Young
Head of Resettlement Policy
Ministry of Justice
Hello Lighthouse.
Bring us a strategy to shape, a service to redesign, a workflow that's creaking, or a product you want built properly. Or just a feeling that something could be better. That's enough to start.
