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. Built on three pillars: a Playbook we have validated over many engagements, a Platform we have built to support it, and People who have done this work before.
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, inside your organisation.
It is a capability, not a room. A small mixed group of your people and ours, working to the Playbook, on the Platform, with a mandate to test the things your organisation has never had a safe way to test.
A Lab holds a portfolio of questions rather than a single brief. Each one gets framed as an assumption, tested at the smallest useful scale, and either earns its way to a pilot or answers the question and closes. The portfolio belongs to the Lab, so people can back a promising idea and let the evidence decide, with their standing intact either way.
Typically six to eighteen months: long enough for the practice to stick. Your people learn it by doing the work. When we step back, the Lab stays: the team, the evidence, the Platform and the habit of working this way.
From assumption to real change.
The Playbook is our method for framing problems, exploring context, designing experiments and making decisions grounded in evidence. It keeps the whole chain of reasoning visible and testable, so every decision can be traced back to the evidence underneath it, and stopping is always a legitimate outcome.
Aligned with HM Treasury’s Magenta Book and its test-and-learn approach.
Assumptions
What we think we know, and what we don’t. The riskiest first.
Research and evidence
Targeted inquiry fills the gaps the assumptions expose.
Experiments
Hypothesis-driven tests in real contexts, at the right scale.
Pilots
What survives, scaled carefully with the exit designed in.
Products, services, policies, workflows
Real change, grounded in what we proved along the way.
The published Playbook, with the guides and tools we use ourselves, is coming soon.
Where the work lives.
Teams lose the chain of reasoning: the assumption that shaped the research, the experiment that tested it, the decision that followed. The next question starts from a blank board.
The Platform holds that chain whole, on a knowledge base we build and keep current: your evidence, published research, interviews, policy documents, the Lab’s notes, all traceable to source. Searchable by meaning as well as keyword, so you can come at one question from several directions and see themes that would otherwise stay buried.
The AI surfaces, the people decide. Secure, isolated per Lab, and yours when we step back.
Built together.
Innovation is a team sport. Edison’s genius was a lab full of people who called themselves the Muckers: systematic, relentless, comfortable failing until something worked.
That is the practice we hire for, a small core and a hand-picked network of practitioners, service and policy designers, user researchers, behavioural scientists, data specialists and innovation leads, who have led change inside Britain’s biggest institutions.
They embed alongside your team, never above it. Coaching, pairing, making together, not reports handed down. Comfortable in the messy middle of a problem, because that is where the real work happens.
Same method. Every Lab different.
The Playbook is the constant. Your team, your problem and your context decide everything else.
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, embedding, coaching or leading, and our role shifts over time from leading to supporting to stepping back entirely.
The rhythm follows the problem, and the governance sits inside your existing structures, producing evidence in formats your decision-makers already recognise.
“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.”
“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.”
“Lighthouse’s ability to translate strategic ambiguity into a clear, well-argued narrative was central to getting this in front of our Exec Team… They bring real expertise and credibility, and are a delight to work with as people and as a team.”
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.