Governing Quintuple Helix Innovation: Urban Living Labs and Socio-Ecological Entrepreneurship

Growing urbanization puts pressure on both social and ecological systems. This pressure raises complex and multi-facetted challenges that can only be tackled by collaborative and distributed innovation development processes. However, theoretical frameworks that assess such collaborations are often very conceptual, with little focus on the actual governance mechanisms that facilitate them. This article studies the urban living lab concept as an inter-organizational design and multi-stakeholder innovation development process to govern the quintuple helix model for innovation by means of an action research based multidimensional case study design, which focusses on the concepts of innovation democracy, mode 3 knowledge production, the innovation ecosystem as a system of societal subsystems, and socio-ecological transition. In this way, we provide a more profound understanding of such innovation processes to tackle socioecological challenges by means of public–private interactions driven by eco-entrepreneurship.