UBC’s Campus as a Living Lab (CLL) offers significant supports for faculty, staff, students, and partners to address urgent global sustainability challenges, grounded in the local contexts and conditions of the university’s campuses.

The supports offered by the CLL team enable UBC to meet a dual responsibility to:

• Explore and advance the various dimensions of sustainability through interdisciplinary research, teaching, and learning, and
   
• Exemplify sustainable innovation and best practices in its operations and related activities both on and off campus

The CLL team helps connect faculty and staff across diverse units of the university, offering tailored guidance to develop living lab ideas, foster collaborations, identify resources, and navigate UBC procedures and requirements. By leveraging the campus as a vibrant testing ground, we help empower the UBC community to innovate and co-create impactful solutions.

Facilitating partnerships between academics and operations

One of the core requirements of all CLL projects is the co-creation process, led jointly by academic and operational staff. This ensures that both research excellence and implementation expertise work together to address sustainability challenges.

The CLL team facilitates these partnerships to ensure projects are deeply rooted in UBC’s real-world context and create pathways for impactful outcomes. By bridging academic research and operational expertise, we help connect solutions from the university to broader communities.

Proposal development and coaching

Whether developing a proposal for the CLL Fund Competition or conceptualizing a new living lab idea, our team can help refine ideas, align them with UBC’s sustainability goals, and offer insights into how to structure proposals for maximum impact. We help teams enhance clarity, feasibility, and collaborative potential, while also connecting them to resources and networks that strengthen their proposals.

Collaboration with research teams

Our role extends beyond project initiation. We work closely with research teams to foster ongoing collaboration, build strategic partnerships, and ensure effective knowledge mobilization. By connecting academic and operational collaborators, internal and external resources, and other support units, we help sustain momentum and amplify their impact throughout the project lifecycle.

Major grant application support

We actively support researchers to strengthen major grant applications by identify living labs opportunities and integrating the living lab concept and methodology into their proposals. This approach leverages UBC’s exceptional academic and operational resources to enhance the relevance, feasibility, and implementation potential of proposed solutions.

Please get in touch.