Landscape Analysis for Creating WEF-Nexus Driven Open Living Labs in Mediterranean Countries

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

1 Department of Business, Faculty of Commerce, Cairo University, Egypt

2 Deputy Director Research and Innovation, ASRT, Egypt.

3 Egyptian Center for Innovation and Technology Development, Egypt.

Abstract

WEF nexus refers to using natural resources to address water, energy, and food security in the context of social and economic needs. The demand for WEF resources in Mediterranean countries increases with the ongoing growth in population and transition toward more prosperous economies. In this regard, the involvement of all nexus ecosystem actors in innovation and policy-making processes gained more attention over time. In this context, a methodological approach, such as living labs, emerged as a platform to achieve inclusivity and participation in addressing WEFN challenges in Mediterranean countries. Due to the concept’s relative newness, this paper explores the implementability of WEF living labs in Mediterranean countries. In this line, the paper seeks to identify the needs and potential domains of support for WEF living labs by investigating the external landscape of the WEF ecosystem in 7 MED countries: Egypt, Spain, Italy, Tunis, Jordan, Lebanon and Cyprus. This investigation aims to build an understanding of the environmental context through extended PESTEL analysis and explore the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats as well as necessary actions to be taken by conducting extended SWOT and SOR analyses per each involved country. The findings show the MED countries share many similarities regarding the external and internal context of creating WEF living labs. MED countries could pursue various innovative system improvements targeting WEF challenges. However, many challenges still exist in the current WEF nexus environment, particularly on the WEF-innovation policy framework level and the difficulty of achieving alignment and orchestration of WEF ecosystem stakeholders. These results ensure the significant role the WEF living labs approach could play in addressing WEF challenges in MED countries.

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