From Regulatory Challenges to Policy Recommendations: A Co-Creation Journey

On 14 July 2026, an online workshop brought together living lab practitioners from across Europe and Canada to finalise policy recommendations on regulatory barriers and enablers in transitional care. Facilitated by Francesca Sperandio and Martina Desole of the European Network of Living Labs (ENoLL) alongside Despoina Petsani, the 90-minute session invited participants to ground abstract regulatory debates in concrete experience drawn from their own projects.

📺 Missed the webinar or would like to revisit the discussion?

Watch the full recording here:

The workshop marked the culmination of several months of work. The process began with a survey distributed to living labs working in healthcare, which identified the main regulatory barriers and enabling factors encountered in practice. A first workshop then explored the concept of regulatory learning and produced initial policy recommendation ideas, which were subsequently presented during the annual regulatory learning session with the Joint Research Centre. Where earlier activities addressed transitional care in general terms, this session took a deliberately targeted approach.

Discussion was structured around three use cases: hospital discharge management and monitoring; remote monitoring and home-based care optimisation; and inclusive technologies for ageing and chronic care. Participants worked through each in turn using a shared Miro board, identifying barriers before moving to ideal solutions and finally to concrete asks for policymakers. Facilitators stressed that the use cases were not mutually exclusive, but served to give the transitional care pathway a more precise focus.

Data emerged as the dominant theme across all three use cases — specifically, questions of responsibility, liability, consent and interoperability. Janette Hughes of the Digital Health and Care Innovation Centre in Scotland described how information governance routinely delays projects, noting that applications within NHS settings can take six months to clear. Her organisation has been testing an alternative in which the patient holds their own data and grants consent to share it directly, an approach that in one carers-focused living lab saw governance signed off within days. Teemu Santonen raised the burden of repeating full approval processes for minor procedural changes, proposing pre-verified templates instead. Àlex from Neàpolis described waiting up to a year to have new devices validated in Catalonia, making fast-paced testing effectively impossible. Sara Ahmed pointed to parallel initiatives requiring duplicate data-sharing agreements, and to the persistent need to print records into patient charts for legal reasons.

A recurring proposal was the proportionality of regulation. Participants argued that requirements should reflect both technology readiness and service readiness — a text message in a discharge workflow carries different risk than continuous cardiac monitoring feeding a hospital dashboard. Several suggested living labs could act as regulatory sandboxes: trusted environments where technologies are validated at earlier stages and regulators engage with communities before rules are set. Hughes also called for dedicated innovation transfer budgets, arguing that evidence without a route into routine practice yields no impact.

ENoLL will now draft the policy recommendations from these inputs, with a validation workshop planned for September. Participants may continue contributing examples via the Miro board and the ENoLL healthcare working group. A related session will take place at Open Living Lab Days in Belgium.

Sister-Projects Joint Webinar on Experimentation Frameworks for Testing Innovations | Recap

As emerging technologies move faster than the environments available to validate them, structured spaces for testing have become essential. Addressing this need, EVOLVE2CARE joined its sister projects FINEX and APROVALS on 2 July 2026 to deliver a joint webinar on experimentation frameworks for testing innovations.

The session brought together innovators, Living Labs, researchers and policy-oriented stakeholders to examine how test beds, Living Labs and regulatory sandboxes each support the validation of new technologies, and how the three approaches connect across an innovator’s journey.

🎥 Missed the webinar or would like to revisit the discussion?

Watch the full recording here:

Experimentation Spaces and Test Beds

David Bigorra, Consultant at Cleantech Group representing FINEX, opened by defining experimentation spaces as controlled but realistic environments where innovators test new technologies before entering the market. He noted this is especially critical for hardware-intensive innovations in energy, cities and industrial processes, where full-scale testing is expensive, risky and often constrained by regulation. He presented FINEX’s four-step methodology — policy workshops, ecosystem mapping, matchmaking and pilot implementation, and learning — alongside its key outputs: a help desk serving as the entry point for guidance, a best practices report, and a resources catalogue listing more than 100 testbeds, Living Labs and sandboxes across six ecosystems. A policy roadmap and recommendations are currently in development.

Connecting Innovation with Living Labs

Anastasia Valtopoulou, Research Associate at iMedPhys, AUTH, introduced EVOLVE2CARE, a five-partner project running from October 2024 to September 2026 and built around transitional care — the safe transfer of patients between environments such as hospital, rehabilitation centre and home. The project matches innovators with certified Living Labs through the AxeLab platform, developed in collaboration with ENoLL, and provided ten vouchers of 5,000 euros to external companies. Its open call generated 44 project requests and 32 bids, resulting in 18 matched Living Labs and companies.

Despoina Petsani, Research Associate at iMedPhys, AUTH, presented the Living Labs framework, drawing on the European Network of Living Labs definition of Living Labs as open innovation ecosystems in real-life environments based on systematic user co-creation. She outlined facility types — single-sited, distributed, virtual and mobile — and three access modes: excellence-driven, market-driven and wide access. Evidence from the EVOLVE2CARE matchmaking showed expert opinion and advisory services among the most requested, alongside participant recruitment, co-creation, proof of concept and usability testing.

Setting the Stage for Regulatory Sandboxes

Alexis Biton, Head of International Affairs and APROVALS Coordinator, described APROVALS as an eight-partner project launched in September 2024 across seven countries, targeting cellular agriculture technologies. Its virtual sandbox, supported by a network hub and a policy hub, offers a governed, confidential space where innovators can de-risk development ahead of — and distinct from — any formal regulatory sandbox.

Towards a Common Pathway

The closing exchange converged on a shared agenda: demonstrating a continuous pathway from test bed to Living Lab to sandbox, and identifying the gaps between those stages. Speakers agreed to continue the discussion offline with a view to presenting joint findings.

Project Session on Policy Recommendations for Transitional Care

On 14 July 2026, the EVOLVE2CARE project will hold the third and final workshop in its series on regulatory barriers and enablers in transitional care. Titled “Finalisation of Policy Recommendations on Regulatory Barriers and Enablers in Transitional Care,” the online session will run from 14:30 to 16:00 (Brussels time) and mark a key milestone in the project’s work to support HealthTech innovation in integrated health and care systems.

Transitional care remains a critical component of integrated health and care systems, particularly in meeting the needs of individuals with complex and long-term care requirements. The two previous workshops in this series, held in February and March 2026, explored the regulatory landscape affecting transitional care innovation. Those sessions brought together innovators, Living Labs, researchers, and policymakers to identify key barriers, enabling factors, and emerging lessons from policy and practice across different contexts, drawing on collaborative exercises and a dedicated regulatory learning survey.

Building on these discussions, the third workshop will shift the focus from analysis to action. Rather than revisiting the challenges already mapped, participants will work together to translate the insights and evidence gathered so far into concrete, actionable policy recommendations. The aim is to support the implementation and scaling of innovative transitional care solutions, ensuring that the project’s findings reach those best placed to enable change.

The session will open with a welcome and introduction led by Francesca Sperandio of the European Network of Living Labs (ENoLL), followed by a recap of the regulatory barriers and enablers in HealthTech innovation identified during earlier sessions. The core of the workshop is a sixty-minute co-creation segment dedicated to finalising the policy recommendations, facilitated by Despoina Petsani of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (AUTH) and Martina Desole of ENoLL. A wrap-up covering the agreed next steps will close the meeting.

The findings from this workshop, together with the outcomes of the previous sessions, will be synthesised into a comprehensive report aimed at guiding policy makers in enabling and promoting transformative innovation more effectively. In doing so, EVOLVE2CARE continues its effort to bridge the gap between innovation and implementation, working towards a more responsive regulatory environment for the future of healthcare. This final session builds directly on the collaborative momentum established across the series, closing the loop between the barriers first identified and the practical measures needed to address them.