Towards a Service-Based Innovation Model
📍 Zagreb, 1 October 2025
How do we make sure that research infrastructures don’t just live in their own bubbles, but actually talk to each other? How can platforms built for discovery, knowledge graphs, and innovative services come together to spark something greater than the sum of their parts?
On 1 October in Zagreb, during the Innovation Prototyping Lab event (first out of three to be organised by both projects), the teams behind the LUMEN and GRAPHIA projects will roll up their sleeves in a joint workshop, designed precisely for that: to map and innovate on the functionalities developed in three OPERAS projects: LUMEN, FASCA and GRAPHIA. OPERAS Innovation Lab’s team members Elena Sokolova and Magdalena Wnuk will support these efforts and help turn promising ideas into sustainable, service-based solutions.
Why this workshop?
LUMEN develops open discovery platforms across domains like SSH, Earth systems, and molecular dynamics, enabling new ways to find and connect knowledge. GRAPHIA is weaving a knowledge graph for the social sciences and humanities, enhanced by AI-powered services and APIs to make research data richer, smarter, and more connected. With contributions from FASCA, we have a unique mix of outcomes, prototypes, and services – each valuable on its own, but with even more potential when combined.
This workshop is about finding cross-project functionalities and helping bring their true potential. And it’s precisely where OPERAS Innovation Lab brings its expertise: supporting projects not only in conceiving ideas but in refining, prototyping, and scaling them into impactful services.
What will happen in Zagreb?
The LUMEN & GRAPHIA: Mapping crossproject functionalities: Towards a
service-based innovation model workshop will guide participants through a hands-on process:
- Presenting results – a short dive into the key expected results from LUMEN, GRAPHIA, and FASCA.
- Mapping exercise – teams will visually chart all outputs and functionalities to see the bigger picture.
- Prioritisation – participants will highlight the most promising overlaps and cross-functionalities.
The role of OPERAS Innovation Lab is to anchor these exercises in a service-innovation mindset: helping participants see not just connections on paper, but the pathways that can turn overlaps into joint services.
The session doesn’t stop at sticky notes and diagrams. By the end, we aim to:
- Create a shared map of what these projects are building.
- Draw cross-links between outcomes, tools, and services.
- Select one concrete use case to take forward into the Lab for further prototyping.
Why does this matter?
Research infrastructures are evolving fast, but too often in silos. By co-designing at this stage, and with the guidance of OPERAS Innovation Lab’s Accelerator, the LUMEN x GRAPHIA workshop will help shape a service-based innovation model, where outputs are not isolated deliverables but interconnected services ready to be reused and re-imagined.
This is more than a workshop – it’s a chance for development teams to experiment with interoperability in practice, while also embedding their work within the wider innovation ecosystem that OPERAS fosters.
For more information on the Innovation Prototyping Lab event in Zagreb see the GRAPHIA project website: https://graphia-ssh.eu/news-blog/innovation-prototyping-lab-2025/