An Idea Worth Borrowing: How "AMO" could Strengthen Europe's Living Labs

PROBONO, a Horizon 2020 project dedicated to demonstrating sustainable and people-centred building renovation through a network of Living Labs across Europe, has generated valuable lessons not only about innovation itself, but also about what it takes to deliver it.

When a research project sets out to renovate a building, retrofit a neighbourhood, or build something genuinely new in the physical world, the hard part is rarely the idea. The idea is usually brilliant, which is why it was funded. The hard part is everything between the idea and the finished thing: the feasibility study nobody has time to prepare, the permit that takes longer than anyone expected, the procurement process that quietly stalls because no one in the room has run one before.

We have all watched ambitious built-environment ideas meet the practical reality of delivery. And one of the clearest lessons to emerge is also one of the most hopeful: there is a well-established discipline, already mature in France, that addresses this gap. The French call it Assistance à Maîtrise d'Ouvrage, or AMO. It deserves to be far better known across Europe, and the opportunity to embed it in future projects is quite exciting.

What AMO actually is

The "assistance to the project owner" translation is accurate but undersells it. AMO is a structured advisory function that sits on the owner's side of a project, deliberately separate from the architects, designers and contractors, more as a professional bridge between what a client wants, and the technical and commercial world that wants must travel through to become real.

It is not the same as technical expertise about the innovation itself, and it is not consultancy in the abstract. An AMO advisor is the person who can look at a Living Lab's intentions and say, with experience behind them: here is what this will actually cost, here is the permit you'll need and when to apply for it, here is how we should go to market, and here is the business case that will convince your stakeholders to commit.

In practice, the support tends to span two phases (which are opportunities identified in D8.13, titled “Governance and policy recommendations”). Before a project begins, AMO covers feasibility studies and option appraisal, business-case development, regulatory mapping and permit strategy, and early budget benchmarking and risk identification. Once a project is moving, it shifts to procurement strategy, tender documentation and bid evaluation, works supervision, and cost control.

The lesson from PROBONO: capacity varies, and that's normal

One of PROBONO's deliberate strengths was the sheer diversity of its Living Labs. That diversity is also what surfaced the insight. A university campus with a seasoned facilities team is simply not in the same starting position as a small municipality with no technical department. A developer who reads building regulations for breakfast is not in the same place as a housing association commissioning its first retrofit.

This is a structural fact about bringing together different kinds of organisations, and also is what makes the Living Lab model so valuable in the first place. The point is that delivery capacity is uneven by design, and once this is recognized, a solution becomes obvious. You don't ask every partner to suddenly become an expert in construction procurement, but you would rather give them access to someone who already is.

If this access isn’t there, the result won’t be a dramatic failure but more quiet pains: the preparatory steps taken later than they should have been, business cases that took a long time to firm up, decisions revisited because the groundwork hadn't been laid, project sponsors not kept engaged.

Why this is an opportunity, not a problem?

It would be easy to frame all this as a gap, but we would rather frame it as it really is: a low-cost, high-leverage improvement that's sitting right in front of us.

Economically, an AMO support is modest relative to the capital cost of the works it governs (a sensible benchmark is somewhere around three to five percent of planned works value). For that, a project buys early validation of its concepts, credible and independently checked cost estimates, smoother regulatory and procurement journeys, and a real reduction in the risk of money spent on interventions that were never going to perform. Few investments in a project's structure offer that kind of return.

Moreover, the benefits do compound. A Living Lab supported by qualified AMO from the outset can validate ideas early and avoid committing to interventions that won't deliver, and this, possibly from the early stages of a proposal. It can win stakeholder confidence with numbers that have been stress-tested by a neutral expert. It can manage permits and tenders proactively rather than scrambling reactively, which is usually where the lost months hide. And crucially, it frees the project's technical and research talent to do what they're brilliant at, instead of being pulled into procurement paperwork they were never meant to handle.

How to make it happen?

The encouraging part is that none of the practical steps are difficult. A few sensible moves would make AMO a normal, expected feature of built-environment projects rather than a lucky accident.

Start with a light-touch capability check at the beginning of each project, starting with a structured look at what skills a Living Lab already has, measured against what its planned works will demand. The point isn't to grade anyone but to produce a clear picture of where support would help most. From there, a support can be funded, as an eligible direct cost on a par with technical consultancy or evaluation, rather than something partners have to scrape together.

A simple feasibility checkpoint before major spending (for example, a documented study and a validated business case signed off by the consortium) turns out to be one of the cheapest forms of insurance available, and AMO is what produces it. And for smaller partners whose individual works might not justify a dedicated appointment, there's a simple answer: pooling the support. A single qualified AMO team can serve several Living Labs within a team, sharing the cost while giving every site the oversight it needs. Smaller municipalities and community organisations, often the most ambitious and the most stretched, stand to gain the most from this.

The bigger picture

Europe is rightly investing in innovation in the built environment, with greener buildings, smarter neighbourhoods, and the kind of living demonstration sites that turn good research into something people can actually walk into. Funding that innovation without also funding the capacity to deliver it is, as the day to day experience gently reminds us, a false economy.

Again, the good news is that the missing piece already exists, tested and refined, here in Europe. AMO is not a new concept, it's a proven discipline that needs adopting. Borrowing it, and building it into how future calls are designed, funded and evaluated, could be one of the most straightforward, high-value upgrades available to the Living Lab model.

This discussion is a first step of a journey: an upcoming PROBONO article will build on the findings of Deliverable D8.13 to explore practical governance and delivery mechanisms that can strengthen the next generation of European Living Labs.

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