Keeping It Real: Insights from a Sport-Based Living Lab

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Many thanks for the opportunity to review this paper, which I found very interesting. By proposing an approach that has (to my knowledge) not been used in sport for development before, the paper makes an obvious contribution to the literature and therefore, I believe it could be suitable for publication. However, there are a couple of areas which I think could be strengthened before recommending publication.

First, I never really had a clear sense or definition of what a Living Lab is. The authors rather assume that the reader is familiar with the concept. There is a short (one sentence) introduction to the term on page 2 (line 49-52), but it wasn’t until I started to read the variety of different ways that the Living Labs had been interpreted and implemented (from page 3 onwards) that I had any real sense of what a Living Lab ‘looks like’ or indeed is. While it would appear that there are multiple ways in which a Living Lab can be designed and developed, there must be some (theoretical) guiding principles upon which they are built? Some of these are mentioned in the introductory sentence on page 2, but I think this needs to be extended (perhaps at the beginning of section 2) to familiarise the reader explicitly with some insight into the theoretical foundations of a Living Lab.

Second, while I found section 3 very interesting, it was a very descriptive section. When proposing a novel approach, as this paper does, it is important that there is some attempt to outline how this approach addresses some of the methodological or theoretical (or indeed practical) challenges/limitations of using other approaches/models. This would help strengthen the argument around the value and utility of a Living Lab approach. I would be inclined to re-visit sections 3.1 to 3.7 to provide a more critical lens on the derivation of your Living Lab. I also noticed that engagement with the literature in Section 3 was also quite light (for example, there are no references used in section 3.5). Again, I encourage the authors to revisit each sub-section in Section 3 to connect more explicitly the ideas presented against previous literature.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

I have no suggested edits and believe that this contributes nicely to the literature. This is an excellent conceptual paper and very valuable to expanding the understanding of Sport for Development strategies - as said in the paper, some communities have probably used this or pieces of it in their efforts to be more inclusive in sport venues. However many would have 'given up' because it is so labour intensive (which might be the one addition I would make to your paper) but it validates their efforts and may serve as a motivator as well as a resource to further develop their programs.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf