A locally embedded venture-building capability that turns local challenges into investable businesses, mobilising local capital, entrepreneurs and expertise to build solutions that last.
Cities and regions face challenges across waste, housing, mobility, demographic change, energy and climate resilience. There are ideas everywhere. The harder problem is turning the best of them into solutions that survive grants, pilots and public funding cycles.
The Lab creates a pathway from a real local challenge to a commercially viable opportunity that can attract private investment and sustain itself.
The idea hasn’t failed. The structure supporting it has disappeared.
Same challenge. Same idea. What changes is everything after it.
Turning a local challenge into an evidenced business case once meant months of consultant time, a development budget, and a grant to pay for both. That is precisely how good ideas became grant-dependent: the money was spent finding out whether they worked. That cost has collapsed, which changes what a city can attempt and how many attempts it can afford to make.
Market sizing, regulatory scanning, competitor and demand analysis. Work that used to be billed in weeks.
Landing pages, brochures, brand and investor materials produced and iterated in days rather than months.
Functioning MVPs and apps that would previously have required a funded development team to reach.
Co-pilots and automation let a lean local team run a portfolio of opportunities, not one at a time.
Innovation no longer has to happen where the engineers and the capital are concentrated. It can happen where the problem is.
What hasn’t changed is the judgement. Knowing which problems are worth solving, who will pay, and whether the demand is real is still the hard part. Cheap to build is not the same as knowing what to build, and that is the work the Lab does.
A repeatable local pipeline for identifying opportunities, validating commercial potential, mobilising capital and building ventures.
Prioritise local challenges where economic value and impact overlap.
Build the evidence, commercial model and investment case.
Bring together local operators, customers, strategic partners and investors.
Turn the strongest cases into real products, services and companies.
Each cycle strengthens local capability, networks and knowledge.
Build solutions around durable demand and economics, not the next funding cycle.
Engage investors and strategic partners whose interests overlap with the challenge.
Move beyond workshops and concepts into business cases, operators, capital and business creations.
Every case strengthens the Lab’s network, knowledge and ability to build the next one.
Net Positive Labs
Building a venture capability from scratch requires specialist teams, methodologies, technology, investor networks and accumulated operating experience. The Lab gives a city access to that infrastructure without outsourcing the capability itself.
The Lab is embedded locally and shaped around local priorities and stakeholders. Net Positive Labs provides the operating system, programme management, methodology, digital infrastructure, mentors and specialist venture-building capability as needed.
Net Positive Labs created the Local Solutions Lab programme so cities can start building and activating local innovation quickly, at relatively low cost, without first having to create an entire venture studio from scratch. Most importantly, it is not an outsourced innovation function. The Lab is established locally: the city owns the capability, the relationships, the opportunity pipeline and the value it creates.
A repeatable structure for turning local challenges into investable opportunities and locally rooted ventures.
Net Positive Labs helps run the programme, coordinate stakeholders, maintain momentum and move opportunities through the pipeline.
Practical venture-building tools, templates and decision points for discovery, validation, business-case development, investment and launch.
A shared digital home for challenges, business cases, investor engagement, resources, feedback and the wider Lab network.
Structured access to experienced operators, entrepreneurs and specialists, with clear preparation and follow-up around each interaction.
Technology, product, design, commercial, sustainability and sector expertise deployed only when an opportunity needs it.
Cities can prioritise challenges; researchers and entrepreneurs can build investment cases; investors and partners can discover opportunities; mentors and Net Positive Labs can review progress and provide structured feedback.
Most cities have private capital looking for somewhere sensible to go: companies with a strategic stake in the problem, family businesses with a long view, family offices seeking assets they understand. What is usually missing is a credible business case and a route in. Private investment is not the last step. Investors and strategic partners shape opportunities from the beginning.
Invest where the solution reduces their cost, secures supply or opens a market. Often the first customer as well as the first investor.
Long-horizon capital with local knowledge and local stake, frequently underserved by conventional venture routes.
Bring distribution, infrastructure, assets or operating capability alongside capital.
Public co-investment vehicles, impact funds and, where appropriate, community investment or crowdfunding.
The Lab doesn’t replace the local ecosystem. It connects, reinforces and equips it.
Not every public challenge should become a business. The Lab exists to find the ones where unmet demand, avoidable cost, underused assets or new value can support a viable model.
Residents don’t sort waste properly, collection is inefficient, and landfill costs keep rising.
The city imports most of its food, making it expensive, fragile and environmentally costly.
Heatwaves are intensifying and older residents have no reliable support system during peak heat.
Local Solutions Lab combines Net Positive Labs’ experience building real businesses with its work developing innovation capability inside local ecosystems.
Furniture waste is a costly and highly visible problem in fast-growing cities. Net Positive Labs worked with local investors to build a technology-enabled reuse and recommerce business around it, developing the product, operating model, brand, go-to-market, commercial partnerships and investor engagement. The result is a venture owned and operated in the region, addressing a challenge shared by cities across it.
Net Positive Labs designed and delivered an accelerator for Valencia Innovation Capital, a City Council initiative, focused on net zero solutions in the built environment. We recruited the cohort, built the curriculum, ran masterclasses and in-person bootcamps, and mentored teams through validation. Participants graduated with a refined solution, a tested MVP and go-to-market roadmap, and a local community around them.
Mustadam demonstrates the venture-building model. Valencia demonstrates the local capability model. Local Solutions Lab brings the two together.
The ambition is a global network of locally established Labs that learn from one another, share what works and replicate proven solutions instead of repeatedly starting from zero. Discussions are already taking place with cities and partners in multiple geographies.
Starting with a model validated in another Lab can significantly reduce the cost of preparing the business case and building the venture, while lowering execution risk through real-world evidence, operating knowledge and reusable technology.
When a locally created solution is adapted by another Lab, the originating venture or Lab can participate in the upside through licensing, profit share or other commercial structures. Local innovation becomes shared infrastructure.
You do not need to establish a full Lab from day one. Start with something tangible, demonstrate the model and build the local capability from there.
Already have a promising initiative, research project, technology or public-sector solution? Build the business around it.
Run a focused challenge, hackathon or competition that turns priority local problems into concise business cases designed for activation, not just prizes.
Create the ongoing capability to identify challenges, build investment cases, mobilise capital and launch locally rooted ventures year after year.
1–2 activated opportunities and a prospective investor / partner database of 100+ relevant contacts.
5+ activated opportunities annually and a prospective investor / partner database of 500+ contacts.
Expand the number of cases as local team capacity, investor depth and proven operating models grow. Indicative targets, not historical results.
Net Positive Labs is an execution-first innovation and venture studio. We provide the programme management, venture-building methodology, digital home, mentors and flexible specialist teams behind each Lab.
A business case does not need the same team at every stage. The Lab can draw on different specialists as an opportunity evolves.
The Lab is locally established by the city and any other local founding sponsors. Net Positive Labs provides the operating model, programme management and specialist venture-building capability.
The ventures are independent and locally rooted. Exact structures can include entrepreneurs, the Lab, local investors, strategic partners and other relevant stakeholders depending on the opportunity.
The Foundation: a lean local team operates the Lab, develops cases and maintains stakeholder and investor relationships.
Net Positive Labs Infrastructure & Support: an initiation and annual fee provides access to programme infrastructure, methodologies, tools, the digital platform, mentors, specialist support and the growing shared solution library.
Solution Development Funding: pre-seed capital for selected ventures is raised from external private investors and strategic partners rather than treated as core Lab operating cost.
Initially the city and/or local founding sponsors. Costs can also be shared with community or private foundations, corporates, universities, family offices and other local impact makers.
Relevant local corporates, SMEs, family businesses, family offices, institutional investors and strategic capital providers. In some cases community investment or crowdfunding may also be appropriate.
The Lab does not start with entrepreneurs or ideas looking for support. It starts with real local challenges, develops commercially viable solutions around them, mobilises investment and builds the strongest into businesses. The objective is a repeatable local capability, not a cohort.
Every place has challenges. Some contain the foundations of businesses, investment opportunities and new sources of local economic value. Local Solutions Lab creates the capability to find and build them.