Were Social Labs immune to COVID-19? Impacts and benefits

The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted higher education worldwide. Higher education institutions needed to adapt very rapidly to the crisis and a new environment, and also needed to revise their role in society. Higher education institutions can contribute to social innovation through research, education and helping to address citizens’ issues and communities’ needs, which is why the creation of social labs by higher education institutions has increased in the last decades. Social labs are spaces where higher education institutions experiment and test new ideas. However, social labs at higher education institutions are still a relatively new phenomenon and have not yet been examined sufficiently. Moreover, it is not fully known how COVID-19 affected social labs’ activities and impacted their establishment. To reflect on the current reality, this article focuses on two research questions: (1) How were social lab activities and partnerships affected during the pandemic? and (2) What impact has COVID-19 had on social labs? To answer these questions, a quantitative survey was conducted, and the data was analysed by quantitative and qualitative methods. The results showed that the biggest challenge lies in organisational processes and human resources management. Yet, it should be noted that COVID-19 also provided opportunities. They are mainly linked with an impulse to develop innovations and increase digitisation in social labs. The study showed that social labs with flexible organisational processes and human resource management were more successful in their adaptation to crisis conditions caused by COVID-19. In summary, this article provides insight into social labs in higher education institutions by bridging an existing knowledge gap in scientific literature, and expands on it by investigating pandemics as having a crisis impact on social lab development.