Work
Where the Lab has worked on the ground, studying technologies as they meet real people, in the places the transition is actually happening.
The Lab's published research and its applied engagements share one root: direct contact with the people a transition affects. Most commissioned work is delivered privately; the cases below are the exceptions, the engagements partners have agreed to share.
Each card is a link. § / Field case denotes an engagement with a named partner; § / Field reading denotes a Lab-authored composite drawn from the same field method.
Kenya · E-mobility
A market of millions of petrol motorcycles being asked to switch to electric. The motorcycle was never the hard part; the financing, the charging, and the after-sales network around it are what carry a rider across the threshold.
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Indonesia · Agriculture & energy
Smallholder farmers turn crop waste that was being open-burned into heat, into soil that raises yields, and into a route to the carbon market, on a portable, open-source kiln. The farmers named it Tumbuh: "to grow."
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Marine · Community monitoring
Community rangers, field sensors, and satellite data braided into a single picture of reef health. Whether the rangers own the data and the community trusts the numbers decides if the reef is actually better protected.
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Kenya · Water & transparency
Open data about water price and quality as a socio-technical intervention. When the households paying the most can finally see what they pay for, the water market begins to change, but only if the transparency reaches and is trusted by the people on the wrong side of the asymmetry.
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Dutch Caribbean · Public sector
Planning transport for a community of a few thousand, where every assumption imported from a large mainland system fails. A public-sector reading in the Lab's Dutch Caribbean practice, in Dutch and English.
Read the case →The pieces below are Lab readings, illustrative composites in sectors where our field method applies but no single named engagement sits at the front. They draw on the same discipline as the field cases above and are used as the featured card on the matching expertise page.
East Africa · Market entry
What a European mobility venture learned before committing capital to a new market, and how field evidence turned a hopeful expansion into a reasoned one.
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East Africa · R&D-stage prototype
What a European hardware venture learns when a lab-tested solar vaccine fridge meets a rural East African clinic for the first time. The R&D-stage counterpart to Market Entry: the same discipline applied before the design freezes.
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East Africa · Manufacturing
When a product moves from imported to locally assembled, whether the "local" part actually reaches the workers, suppliers, and customers it promises to.
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AI & Digital
When a digital tool designed for always-connected, personal-device users meets an intermittent phone, a shared device, and a language it wasn't tested in.
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Finance · Payment rails
Every transition depends on one prior question: can people pay for it, over time, in the way their income actually arrives.
Read the reading →The Lab's applied cases sit alongside its open articles, electric mobility, regenerative agriculture, environmental monitoring, water access and transparency, and finance, each grounded in one of these field engagements, and its signature BRW framework for how a niche technology bypasses, repurposes, or weakens the barriers an entrenched regime presents. The fieldwork feeds the research; the research sharpens the fieldwork.
To discuss a study in your own market or programme, see Contact. For how an engagement runs, see How It Works.