VidaLab: Rethinking homecare for the ageing population in Navarra
VidaLab, a living lab of longevity, is a permanent innovation infrastructure designed to transform Navarra’s care ecosystem through collaborative experimentation, policy prototyping, and cross-sector coordination.
Conducting user research, developing insights & strategy, and designing prototypes & facilitating workshops.
2025 - Present
Overview
Navarra's demographic profile is characterized by a critical paradox: its success in extending life is creating its primary social and economic challenge. With over 20% of its population above 65 years and projections reaching 30% by 2050, the region confronts an unsustainable care model built on invisible, unpaid family labour—predominantly provided by women—and an increasingly fragile public system.
How might we rethink how care is structured and propose more sustainable, human-centred models that keep people well at home?
20.9%
Navarra already 65+
80%
Care delivered informally
€5.7tn
EU silver economy by 2025
Research & Discovery
Care as holistic need: Elderly individuals and their families emphasised the centrality of emotional well-being, social connection, and psychological support. The current system’s overlooks these dimensions, contributing to social isolation, depression, and diminished quality of life.
Rising informal care demand: Informal caregivers lack training, support, and recognition. Operating in isolation without professional guidance or peer networks, they experience high stress, compromised care quality, and burnout.
Families as system shock absorbers: When public services fail, families compensate by absorbing financial costs, sacrificing employment, and managing coordination across fragmented services.
Scalability challenges in home care: Home healthcare in Navarra is limited, fragmented, and exclusively public. This monopoly structure inhibits innovation, limits service availability, and prevents the emergence of diverse care models adapted to varying needs. The absence of private sector participation restricts scalability and constrains the development of a robust care services industry.
System mapping
We synthesized identified problems into a systems map with "quality home care" at its center, uncovering critical variables, feedback loops, and opportunities for intervention.
Three critical feedback loops emerged from this analysis:
Caregiver Burden Loop: Inadequate support causes burnout and attrition, reducing care quality and intensifying pressure on remaining caregivers in a self-reinforcing negative spiral.
Bureaucratic Delay Loop: Increased regulation intended to ensure quality instead produces delays in service access, generating public frustration that prompts calls for more regulation, further slowing system responsiveness.
Dependency-Cost Loop: Greater institutionalisation drives higher public expenditure whilst simultaneously reducing individual autonomy and wellbeing, creating political pressure for further institutionalisation despite counterproductive outcomes.
Framing the opportunity
Understanding these dynamics enabled us to identify strategic intervention points where modest changes could yield disproportionate system-wide impacts.
Initial assumptions that the challenge was primarily technological or resource-based proved incorrect. Research uncovered a fundamentally human and systemic problem requiring holistic transformation, reframing our core question:
How might we build a resilient, human-centric home care system in Navarra that balances the needs of elders and their caregivers to reduce institutionalisation?
This reframing shift focus from:
Managing decline ——> Enabling wellbeing
Institutional solutions ——> Home based care
Isolated interventions ——> Systemic transformation
Purely public provision ——> Collaborative ecosystem
Solution strategy
VidaLab will serve as Navarra’s permanent infrastructure for care services innovation, a collaborative platform where government, private sector, academia, and civil society co-create, test, and scale solutions to the region’s ageing challenges.
Vision: Transform Navarra into a region where people age with dignity, autonomy, and support, where care strengthens communities rather than straining them, and where innovation creates economic opportunity alongside social wellbeing.
Mission: Establish a sustainable innovation ecosystem that progressively transitions Navarra from an institutionalisation-based care model to a home-centred system through policy prototyping, cross-sector collaboration, and evidence-based scaling.
Guiding Principle: “Care at Home First” prioritising solutions that enable people to age in place with adequate support, reserving institutional care for cases where it genuinely serves individual needs rather than system convenience.
Core functions
Policy Laboratory: Design, prototype, and evaluate innovative care policies before full-scale implementation.
Innovation Broker: Connect solution providers (startups, enterprises, researchers) with real-world testing environments and potential users, reducing barriers to entry for innovators while ensuring innovations address genuine needs.
Knowledge Hub: Generate, synthesize, and disseminate evidence on effective care provision through rigorous evaluation of pilot initiatives, systematic documentation, publication of open datasets, and international knowledge exchange.
Capacity Builder: Strengthen the care ecosystem through training for family caregivers, professional development for care workers, entrepreneurship support, and public sector capacity building for innovation methodologies.
Strategic Objectives
VidaLab will pursue five interconnected strategic objectives:
