UVT Digital and Green Living Lab
About this good practice
UVT Digital & Green Living Lab (LL) is an experienced community of partners covering all quintuple helix stakeholder groups. The LL addresses a wide range of pressing challenges, including bringing awareness to climate change and environmental degradation by testing and promoting green technologies and sustainable practices. LL serves as a dynamic platform to tackle multifaceted challenges related to sustainability, technology, and community well-being, which implicitly means that it is a valuable tool for addressing these complex issues. It does so by developing and testing solutions to enhance the quality of life of community members, addressing concerns related to data privacy and security, educating and incentivizing individuals and businesses to adopt a more sustainable behavior, and fostering innovation and innovative entrepreneurship. The main stakeholders are the members of the academic and research community, the students of the WUT, and the community members, businesses, both local and national, local authorities, and non-governmental institutions. The private sector is represented by multinational companies from the Western region, as well as SME representatives, as members of the Advisory Boards. Regarding beneficiaries, these are firstly represented by members of the academic and research WUT community, students, pupils from regional high schools or other learning institutions, research centers, tourists, NGOs and government agencies, start-ups, or spin-offs.
Resources needed
One of the most relevant resources is embedding the LL approach in structural processes and the governing framework, capacity building where training and appropriation of knowledge are parts of the dimensions and a multi-stakeholders approach where all strategic partners are involved.
Evidence of success
The UVT Digital and Green Living was the catalyst for the creation of the Centre for Innovation and Tech Transfer and fulfils, to this day, the purpose of fostering technology creation, innovation and research through collaborative initiatives such as training in IP and IPR protection, Blended Intensive Learning programmes with students from Universities of the UNITA Consortium on the topic of the Blue Economy, the creation of the UVT Urban Garden, students and external interested parties.
Potential for learning or transfer
The potential for learning and transfer is vast, as the UVT Digital and Green Living Lab serves as a dynamic ecosystem for innovation and co-creation. The beneficiaries and stakeholders can gain valuable insights into the application of sustainable technologies and these lessons can be shared and scaled up to other communities (i.e. Universities) facing similar challenges (i.e. Methodologies on how to build an Urban Garden - a place for the development of sustainable technologies and capacity building for staff). This can accelerate the adoption of best practices and lead to innovative technologies and breakthroughs for community well-being and digital literacy scaled to benefit society at large.