The living lab and the cursed catalyst: Navigating the legitimacy challenges of innovation intermediaries for sustainable innovation

Sustainability challenges, such as water resource management, increasingly demand frontier technologies and the coordination of diverse stakeholders. Living labs have surged globally—often backed by public funding—as pivotal intermediaries in these contexts. Although their effectiveness is debated, little attention has been paid to how they address the challenges of implementing sustainability-oriented innovations that leverage advanced science and engage multiple stakeholders. Focusing on the project level, where operational complexities are most apparent, we examine the ‘MOSIS’ initiative to enhance water management along the Senegal River using a science-based Earth Observation system. This project involves academia, industry, governments, international organisations, and a living lab. Recognised at CoP26 and considered by the World Bank for broader scaling, MOSIS exemplifies the integration of cutting-edge technologies and multi-stakeholder coordination. We identify three roles—technological expert, stakeholder orchestrator, and end-user empowerer—each corresponding to one dimension of legitimacy (instrumental, relational, and moral). When combined, these roles create synergies that endow the living lab with strong active legitimacy, but also trigger dis-synergies that obscure the categorical cues required for passive cognitive legitimacy. We term this predicament the “Cursed Catalyst”: a situation whereby an intermediary's success yields an unbalanced legitimacy portfolio that, unless proactively rebalanced by efforts to strengthen cognitive legitimacy, ultimately constrains its perceived impact on sustainable innovation and jeopardises its long-term survival. These findings have significant implications for research policy and funding bodies, which rely on living labs to accelerate the transfer of frontier science into real-world sustainability contexts. • Highlights living labs' multiple roles in complex sustainability projects • Explores how overlapping roles cause stakeholder confusion and under-recognition. • Introduces “cursed catalyst” to explain the undermining of cognitive legitimacy. • Proposes strategies to foster appreciation of living labs' critical contributions.