Founded in 2000 at the Harvard Graduate School of Education’s Project Zero, “Learning Innovations Laboratory (LILA)” is a consortium of researchers and practitioners who are leaders in the field of organizational learning and change. They collaborate by sharing experimental work and emerging thinking in order to generate effective future practices. With the input of academic experts from a variety of disciplines, these leaders collectively become a ‘learning lab’ in which they learn with and from one another about the contemporary challenges of human learning & innovation in organizations.

LILA has three main goals:

Create social connections: Generate high-trust relationships among top global Chief Learning/Innovation Officers across industries and with top academic thinkers and researchers in the fields of organizational learning and innovation.

Craft intellectual insights: Develop powerful conceptual frameworks that synthesize the latest research and illuminate the challenges facing leaders and organizations.

Have practical impact: Members support one another in making real advances on the organizational challenges they face through soliciting critical feedback on organizational initiatives, exploring questions in small and large group formats, and reporting in on their progress throughout the year.

The LILA community involves non-competing members from three synergistic perspectives:

Organizational Leaders: The Learning Innovations Laboratory (LILA) is a small community of researchers and practitioners dedicated to advancing the understanding and practice of organizational learning and innovation. We are not a best practices group but instead we focus on “next practices” based on robust innovative research and multidisciplinary perspectives. Since its inception in 2000, LILA’s practitioners have been Chief Learning and Chief Innovation Officers from non-competing industries who have established themselves as leaders in their field. At LILA they collaborate to share challenges, ideas, and innovative practices, and to explore current issues in the field through in-depth conversations with academic experts from a variety of disciplines. By limiting the size of the group to twenty-five members and by encouraging continuity of membership, LILA members engage in a deep level of confidential, collaborative inquiry and problem solving. Current LILA members include leaders from Agilent, Cisco, Exxon/Mobil, Gannett, Humana, Monitor, Novartis, Sapient, Steelcase, US Army and W.L. Gore.

Scholars: To fuel the exploration of the annual theme, each year LILA convenes 8-10 leading academic thinkers from a variety of disciplines who are pushing their respective fields. These guest faculty join the Chair members for each of the multi-day gatherings at Harvard University. Recent faculty include Teresa Amabile (Harvard Business School), John Seely Brown (University of Southern California), Warren Bennis (University of Southern California), Amy Edmondson (Harvard Business School), Yrjö Engeström (University of Helsinki), Howard Gardner (Harvard Graduate School of Education), Richard Hackman (Harvard University), Andrew Hargadon (UC Davis Center for Entrepreneurship, Linda Hill (Harvard Business School), Robert Kegan (Harvard Graduate School of Education), Ellen Langer (Harvard Dept of Psychology), Sandy Pentland (MIT Media Lab), Michael Roberto (Bryant University), Peter Senge (MIT Sloan School of Business), Ed Schein (Professor Emeritus, MIT) and Kathleen Sutcliffe (University of Michigan).

Harvard Researchers: A half-dozen Harvard Project Zero researchers and Harvard graduate students work closely with the community to expertly facilitate and document the gatherings, conduct analysis on relevant research, synthesize practical findings, and conduct investigations in the quality of the learning process and outcomes of LILA.