Transitions Lab was established to fill a specific gap in the research landscape. A great deal is written about infrastructure transitions in emerging markets. Rather less is written from the specific vantage point the Lab occupies: close-to-practice fieldwork in the places where transitions are actually happening, combined with the analytical discipline of transitions studies and the quantitative rigour of financial-systems research. Most of what we read on these topics comes either from advocacy organisations with a case to make, or from academic work conducted at a significant distance from operational reality, or from commercial actors with a product to sell. The Lab aims for the middle.
What the Lab is
The Lab is an independent, non-partisan research organisation. It conducts primary research, publishes openly, and does not undertake paid consultancy work that would compromise the independence of its analysis. Its funding is deliberately diversified across public research grants, private foundation support, and academic-institutional partnerships; no single funder has editorial influence over the Lab's output.
The Lab is institutionally small by design. A small research organisation with a clear methodological spine and a tight thematic focus produces, in our experience, more useful output per unit of funding than a larger organisation chasing a broader mandate. We intend to stay small enough that every piece of published work passes under the direct eye of a principal researcher and is grounded in fieldwork the Lab has conducted itself.
The Lab has research bases in Delft (Netherlands) and Nairobi (Kenya), with sustained operational presence in the Dutch Caribbean through long-running applied work on marine monitoring. Most of the Lab's current field research sits in Kenya, where the density of mobile-money infrastructure, the innovation in informal-economy asset finance, and the active electric-mobility transition together produce the richest natural laboratory we know of for the questions we study.
What we work on
The Lab runs three active research programmes and maintains two adjacent frontiers that are scheduled for more sustained attention as the current programmes mature. All five are summarised briefly here; each has its own detailed programme page.
How we work
The Lab's method is the compound of three commitments, applied consistently across programmes.
Primary fieldwork. We conduct our own interviews, run our own transaction-data analyses, and stand up our own prototypes. Secondary analysis of published data is part of what we do; it is not the default. The Lab's field research in Kenya is conducted under institutional ethics oversight (TU Delft Human Research Ethics Committee) and covers semi-structured interviews with riders, operators, financiers, regulators, and community intermediaries.
Structural analysis. Field research produces observations; the discipline of transitions studies turns observations into arguments. The Lab's signature analytical contribution is the bypass–repurpose–weaken (BRW) typology, a three-strategy framework for reading how new infrastructure systems navigate entrenched legacy regimes. The typology was developed through comparative case work on Kenyan electric-mobility and is being extended to finance and water programmes.
Open publication. Every substantive research output the Lab produces is published on this site, in full, and is citable by readers who find it useful. Our working papers carry explicit version numbers; our field notes carry explicit date stamps; our data limitations are acknowledged rather than concealed. We do not hold research outputs behind paywalls, subscriber gates, or "donate-to-read" mechanisms.
What we don't do
A research organisation's posture is as much a matter of what it declines as what it pursues. Several commitments are worth naming explicitly.
We don't do paid advocacy. The Lab does not take funding in exchange for reaching pre-specified conclusions, and we do not work on briefs whose conclusions are set in advance. Where we are asked to provide input to policy processes, we do so on the basis of our own research rather than the commissioner's preferences.
We don't endorse specific commercial products or protocols. The Lab's research on payment-rail interoperability, on asset-finance design, on battery-swap infrastructure, and on adjacent topics is conducted independently of any specific vendor's product, protocol, or standards-setting position. Where a commercial actor appears in our case studies, its appearance is warranted by the research question rather than by any commercial arrangement with the Lab.
We don't over-claim impact. Our deliverables are research outputs. Changes to policy, changes to market practice, and changes to welfare outcomes that follow from our research are the work of many actors, rarely traceable to any single input. We resist the temptation to claim impact that is not cleanly attributable.
Origin and founder
The Lab was founded in 2026 by Marcel Kempers, who serves as principal researcher. The founder is also the CEO of Reef Support B.V., a marine-conservation technology company active since 2020, and a Research Assistant at TU Delft's Faculty of Technology, Policy and Management. The separation between the Lab's research activities and these other commitments is maintained by design: Reef Support is the operational substrate for the marine MRV thread of the Lab's work but does not direct or fund research output; the TU Delft affiliation provides academic supervision and ethics oversight for fieldwork but does not dictate publication timing or content.
The Lab's research methods and analytical contributions — in particular, the BRW typology — were developed through work at the intersection of these three roles. The MSc thesis on ROAM Electric and Kenya's electric-motorcycle transition, conducted under the supervision of Dr. Gideon Ndubuisi at TU Delft TPM, was the methodological crucible in which BRW took its current form. For a full account of the founder's track record and research history, see the team page.
Where we sit institutionally
The Lab operates as an independent research initiative hosted through Reef Support B.V. for administrative purposes, with academic affiliations at TU Delft (Faculty of Technology, Policy and Management) and active partnerships with a broader network of academic and operational institutions across East Africa, the Netherlands, and the Dutch Caribbean. The hosting arrangement is a practical one; it does not confer ownership over the Lab's intellectual output, which is held independently and published under the Lab's own name.
The Lab is not, at the time of writing, a separately incorporated entity. We expect that to change as the volume and independence of our research work grow. For reader enquiries on institutional status — including for grant-funding due diligence — see contact.
How to support the Lab
The Lab welcomes, in decreasing order of simplicity: citation of its research; invitations to present to peer audiences; partnership on field research and pilot programmes; and — for funders — structured support for specific research programmes or for the Lab's core research capacity. A separate programme memorandum is available for potential funders on request through contact.
We do not accept support conditional on pre-specified research conclusions, support that would require non-disclosure of research findings, or support from actors with a direct commercial stake in the outcomes of active Lab research. These are the only substantive restrictions we place on our funding relationships.