Let’s start with an honest observation.

Incubation today has become almost mandatory. Every institution wants to say it has one. There are incubation rooms, banners, committees, review meetings, and sometimes even a few startup success stories to point to.

And yet, if we’re being candid, much of this incubation remains talk-heavy and consequence-light.

We realized this not as critics, but as participants in the system.

So, the question that started this entire journey was not “how do we start another incubator?”

It was much simpler, and a little uncomfortable:

How do we make incubation real enough that learning cannot escape responsibility?

That question led us to the idea of a Living Lab.

A Living Lab is not a classroom, and it’s definitely not a seminar. It’s a live environment. Things are happening. Constraints are real. Decisions have consequences. Learning happens not because someone explained a concept well, but because the situation demanded a response.

In this program, incubation is not an add-on. It is the primary motivation. Everything else exists to support that.

Urban Green enters the picture not as a fashionable theme or a moral lecture. We chose it because it doesn’t allow abstraction. Plants grow or they don’t. Roofs have limits. Cities deal with heat, water stress, waste, and very impatient users. There’s no room here for vague thinking and that’s exactly why it works as an incubation anchor.

By tying incubation to Urban Green, entrepreneurship learning automatically becomes grounded in real people, real timelines, real constraints, and real outcomes.

That is why we call this program Living Lab for Urban Green – An Incubation & Internship Program.

Students here don’t “learn about startups” in the usual sense. They work inside the incubation process itself. They get involved in problem discovery, solution design, pilots, coordination, documentation, learning capture, and iteration.

Some of this effort results in startups.

Some of it strengthens the incubation system itself.

Both matter equally.

This is also why internships are not treated as an afterthought. They are structural to the design. Because the Living Lab runs continuously, across multiple incubation cycles, students can enter real work streams, contribute meaningfully, and leave with clearly defined accomplishments.

We are deliberately not chasing speed or hype here.

What we are chasing is credibility.

A Living Lab allows institutions to say something very concrete:

“This is what our students actually worked on.

This is what changed on the ground.

This is what they learned by doing.”

At a time when education is under pressure to stay relevant, and incubation risks becoming ornamental, this approach keeps both honest.

No sermons.

No shortcuts.

Just real work, in a real setting, leading to real learning.

That’s the idea we’re starting with.