LUMEN’s Innovation Prototyping Lab, or IPL, is a multi-day multiplier event that allows us to gather experts from diverse backgrounds, share knowledge across domains, and co-create in rapid prototyping sprints. By the end of the week project results will have taken a leap:  challenges are solved faster; validation benefits from large groups; live demonstrations inform sustainability strategies; multiple perspectives inspire business models.

The first IPL, in Zagreb in October 2025, focused on cross-domain knowledge exchange and insights into novel technologies by our industry hosts. The second is in Brussels this September. This time we’re making more room for hands-on collaborative prototyping of the project’s tools and tangible outputs that can be user-tested. Validation findings feed back into project development. The resulting affordances inform sessions on governance and sustainability strategies.

The approach comes from MTF Labs, which has run 26 international innovation events over more than a decade. Their methodology is recognised by the European Commission’s Knowledge Valorisation Platform as best practice for knowledge transfer across domains. We’ve adapted it to meet LUMEN’s objective of building a federated discovery infrastructure.

Zagreb, October 2025

The first IPL ran for three days at the Infobip campus in Zagreb with three thematic arcs, one per day. Day one: humans in the loop. Governance, ethics, co-creation. Day two: tools for knowledge exploration. Interoperability and prototyping. Day three: exploitation and sustainability. Business models and industry engagement.

What set it apart from a conventional project meeting was the emphasis on producing tangible outcomes. LUMEN working groups and co-creation workshops generated mock-ups, concept matrices, draft governance models, and a service-mapping framework. Those outputs went straight into the LUMEN Sustainability Roadmap, the design of the EOSC Innovation Centre, and the work on the LUMEN Interdisciplinary Meta-Search.

The European tech unicorn Infobip’s role was instructive. They hosted the event at their Zagreb Campus and joined it as active participants. Their staff sat in on sessions and presented their own operational practice. A working dialogue on building structured conversational flows put research and industry in the same problem-solving frame. A panel on hybrid AI and trustworthy knowledge surfaced the tension between unchecked data and the standards that the research infrastructure is meant to uphold. That gave the event something industry partnerships rarely produce in a research setting. An interlocutor as invested in the questions as the people asking them.

After three days, the consortium left Zagreb with material it could keep working with. An acupuncture point in the project’s development.

Brussels, September 2026

IPL2 takes place in the week of 14 September 2026 at the Maison Irène et Frédéric Joliot-Curie in Brussels. LUMEN partners are bringing working sessions, each built around something a work package needs to progress.

• Sustainability plans and governance models for LUMEN’s principal exploitable results will be refined: the White Label Platform, LUMIS, the Data Mesh Framework, and the EOSC Innovation Centre. This will run in three phases. Task forces will present their most realistic sustainability pathway alongside a governance model; plans will be revised against the discussion; draft roadmaps will be reconciled into a unified version where possible. The output will go straight into a deliverable document.
• A panel with experts from distributed and federated platforms will discuss how governance works in practice. A satellite session at the OPERAS headquarters in Brussels will put the alpha build of the LUMEN White Label Platform in front of researchers from outside the Social Sciences and Humanities. The principle is that cross-disciplinary adaptability has to be tested with people who are not already familiar with the tools.
• Members of LUMEN’s Scientific Domain Committees will join a design sprint as co-designers: Mathematics, Earth Sciences, and Molecular Dynamics meet researchers from the Social Sciences and Humanities. The output will be a domain-specific dissemination plan for 2027, with a KER-to-domain mapping and a priority events list per domain.
• Work that benefits both LUMEN and GRAPHIA will include a cross-project panel called Ontology streamlining: what happens to the ontologists? It’s the kind of question a project might ordinarily avoid in its public output, but which is exactly the kind that should be aired in a working setting if research infrastructure is going to age well.

Everyone in the room at IPL2 will be a participant. A typical day will involve structured working sessions where small groups will address defined problems with specific expected outputs. These will include drafting business model canvases for sustainable service delivery, testing an alpha-build interface against real use cases, and working through governance frameworks with the people who will operate within them.

A conference component will add presentations and discussions to frame the collaborative work. Live recordings with experts and invited guests on site will feed into the project’s Inside EOSC podcast.

To create the programme, LUMEN partners and work package leads have proposed sessions and are being asked to specify what they want to produce: the artefact, prototype, or decision that will result, and how it connects to a deliverable.

The IPL is the proving ground for a working environment where cross-domain innovation is tested and refined as part of research practice. Successful collaboration methods identified at the IPL will be consolidated in the EOSC Innovation Centre, a key project result that LUMEN is helping to design, and its most visible demonstration.

Places for IPL2 in Brussels are extremely limited and reserved for the LUMEN consortium and its stakeholders in industry, academia, and policy. Selected sessions are open to interested external parties. If you would like to participate and experience how the LUMEN project utilises cross-domain collaboration for successful project results, contact us oncommunication.lumen@maxweberstiftung.de