What we do
We reach the people a technology or programme actually meets, measure what changes, and report it honestly.
Independent field evidence for the decision to enter a new market or launch a new product line. Who adopts, at what price, and which failure modes to name early.
Read more → Client question 02What actually changes, for whom, and through what pathway. Reach, depth, and experience, measured from the human side first.
Read more → Client question 03Monitoring, evaluation, dissemination as one connected system. Independent, set up at the start, closed with proof, including for European Grant Agreements.
Read more →Our network
The Lab is a small core in Delft and a wider network of trained field researchers, local analysts and long-standing partners, in Europe and in the places our cases come from.
Programmes
Each programme runs in Europe and in the places our cases come from. The questions do not change when the postcode does.
Who we serve
Five kinds of organisation, each with a different decision in front of them. Tap through for how the fit works in each case.
Field evidence for a market you are about to enter. Who actually adopts, and why.
→Portfolio-wide impact evidence that survives review and travels across projects.
→The independent measurement partner, from baseline through endline.
→Honest evidence of what is changing on the ground, reported truthfully.
→A field partner with reach, and real technical understanding of the systems being studied.
→The most useful thing we do is listen to the people a technology is about to meet, and report what they say honestly.- Transitions Lab
Latest insights
Published openly, alongside our commissioned work. The same evidence-first posture, applied to the big picture.
Insight · Green Industrialisation · Africa
The AfCFTA wants two or three cross-border anchor projects rather than fifty-four national strategies. Adam Smith explained why in 1776, and the obstacles are not tariffs.
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Insight · Green Industrialisation · Africa
Ghana is transferring mining work to Ghanaian contractors and workers warn wages will fall. Competition among sellers to one buyer transmits the pressure to labour by design.
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Insight · Agriculture & Ecosystems
A €40 million European research programme has opened on novel ecosystems. Once a historical baseline is off the table, restoration is a choice about which future counts.
Read →Theory maps
The Lab uses four theory references in the field: the behaviour of real people, the economics of the deal, the strategy of the technology, and the shape of the system as a whole. Each map, each anchored to its canonical sources.
Why people adopt, resist, trust, and abandon technologies.
See 26 concepts → EconomicsWho bears the cost, who captures the value, what the market prices.
See 48 concepts → StrategyHow the technology evolves, how firms compete, how it spreads.
See 31 concepts → SystemHow niches, regimes, and landscapes interact to move a whole system.
Open the primer →Case studies
Most commissioned work is delivered privately. The engagements below are the ones partners have agreed to share.
Kenya · E-mobility
How electric two-wheelers cross the affordability threshold in a petrol-dominated market, with a Kenyan mobility provider.
Read the case →
Indonesia · Agriculture
Smallholder farmers turn crop waste into energy and soil on a decentralised, open-source kiln, with Pyropower.
Read the case →
Kenya · Water
Open data and community accountability change who can hold water systems to account, with the MiMaji Foundation.
Read the case →Free resources
The intellectual apparatus behind the Lab's work, free to download, use, and cite. A working understanding of how technologies meet real people is more useful in the world than in a drawer.
Bypass, Repurpose, Weaken. Three mechanisms matched to the three barriers a niche technology actually meets, and why the choice decides what a transition reaches.
Read → DiagnosticState capacity against niche success. A two-axis diagnostic that sorts every real transition into directed, coordinated, stalled or bounded leapfrogging.
Read → Page + 2 PDFsTechnology and Societal Readiness Levels. Two nine-level scales and the missing middle where most technologies fail to cross.
Read → PDF · 8 pagesWhat a socio-technical system is, why the human side comes first, and how to turn that reading into evidence.
Download → FrameworkFive tiers from activity data at the base to attributable impact at the top. The honest answer to whether a report's number is a claim, an observation, or a conclusion.
Read → TemplateA fill-in baseline-midline-endline framework for any programme that needs to prove what a transition actually changed.
Open →Partners & collaborators
Organisations whose engagements or research base the Lab has worked with, published with, or built its methods alongside.
Start a study
Send a short note about what you need to know and who it concerns. We will come back with an approach, a timeline, and an honest view of what evidence can and cannot settle.
Start a study →
