Juanita

Juanita Devis Clavijo is an Urban Living Lab Developer at AMS Institute. As part of the JVC research collective, she explores how collaboration and joint value creation can strengthen urban innovation processes. Through her experience with Living Labs and innovation ecosystems, she aims to explore how these approaches can better support practitioners in making their work relevant, scalable, and impactful across different domains, organizations and ecosystems.

More about Juanita

Juanita is an Urban Living Lab Developer at the AMS Institute. In this role, she leads urban innovation initiatives that support the establishment of effective collaborative governance structures and the development, testing, and replication of sustainable solutions in real-life environments.

She leads AMS Institute’s contributions to the EU-funded projects ATELIER and EU4ADVICE. In ATELIER, she is responsible for the monitoring and evaluation of the Innovation Ateliers in Amsterdam, Bilbao, and six Fellow Cities, supporting the development of effective governance structures and stakeholder engagement strategies to accelerate the energy transition in Amsterdam and across European cities. In EU4ADVICE, she supports the four Living Labs focused on short food supply chains facilitating their establishment, governance, and integration into regional ecosystems.

As a domain expert, she develops and validates Urban Living Lab tools and methodologies, in close collaboration with AMS’s Urban Living Lab research teams. She contributes to the MADE Living Lab course by teaching and guiding students in applying LL methods in practice and by supervising thesis projects that explore real-life innovation challenges. She also mentors early-stage startups, helping them scope and validate their solutions.

She also coordinates the Urban Living Lab from Theory to Practice initiative, which aligns ongoing ULL research with the ULL Way of Working and the needs of ULL coordinators and innovation practitioners.

From 2022 to 2024, Juanita coordinated the Marineterrein Living Lab (MALL), where she supported experimenters through onboarding, scoping, implementation, and validation to mature solutions supporting joint value creation by aligning stakeholder agendas and challenges. She also contributed to the Open Knowledge Coalition, enabling collaborations and initiatives between Codam, AHK, and AMS Institute.

With a background in urban planning and architecture, she brings expertise in participatory methods, EU project coordination, innovation ecosystems, and applied research focused on enabling urban innovation at the city and ecosystem level. Her experience spans across multiple urban domains including energy, food systems, mobility, inclusion, digital twins, and urban data.

She previously worked as an Urban Design Researcher at imec, contributing to H2020 projects (INDIMO, URBANAGE, TOKEN) on themes such as mobility (CityFlows), digital twins, and inclusion. Until 2018 she was a CityScience Advisor at the MIT Media Lab City Science Group, where she supported the establishment of the Andorra Living Lab, coordinating projects on urban simulation, innovation spaces, education, and cultural heritage.

In her work, Juanita enjoys bridging research and practice, translating innovation insights into actionable strategies that empower practitioners to create value in real contexts. Her goal is to support innovation practitioners in making their work more relevant and impactful, and to explore how Living Lab and innovation models can be replicated across different ecosystems and organizational contexts. Her ambition is to advance methods that help cities and institutions scale successful solutions, strengthen governance and collaboration structures, and overcome silos within organizations, contributing to more sustainable and inclusive urban transformation.