The purpose of the paper is to reflect the role of higher education and education as an academic discipline in multi-actor settings by taking the example of so called “Innovation Labs”. Within “Innovation Labs” as a specific form of “Living Labs” diverse actors are included to develop innovation for specific goals during a co-creative process in real-life contexts. Besides different disciplinary perspectives to analyze Innovation Labs, for example innovation research (Leminen 2015), social-ecological approaches (Keyson et al. 2017), and organizational education (Schröer 2016; Weber 2014a, b), “Innovation Labs” are here addressed as space of power and knowledge co-creation at the interface of economization and aestheticization.

Following the concept of Knowledge Economy, multi-actor settings increasingly become the mode of knowledge creation (Nowotny et al. 2013; Carayannis et al. 2016). For example the common European research agenda “Horizon 2020” shows that research and innovation programmes are set to promote innovation capacity in different fields like industrial leadership, societal challenges and science (https://ec.europa.eu/programmes/horizon2020). Universities are no longer in demand as the only space of knowledge creation and their societal role is raised to question. Within this shift to (applied) research for innovation and the development of competencies for innovation capacity new teaching designs and formats are required, which leads to the question of the role of education and educational research (Meseth 2014).

The format of “Innovation Labs” oscillates between demanding applied research for sustainability and transformation (Schneidewind et al. 2016), concepts of experiential education (Dewey 1979), sustainable education (Bormann und Haan 2008) and the emergence of the new through social design and aestheticization (Reckwitz 2016).

Following a discourse analytical approach, the actors within “Innovation Labs” are embedded in discoursive practices and positionings (Wrana 2015). Focusing on the role of higher education, following questions will be asked: What is the situated knowledge of the actors concerning the role of higher education? What are the positions? 

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