Living Lab’s first economic model was for the Singapore Grand Prix in 2012. In 2025 we became a software platform: government-grade intelligence for the visitor economy
Tourism public value assessment. Living Lab builds the cost side and the return side of a public-value case from the same evidence, and keeps three figures apart: the fiscal return, the wider public outcomes that are real but not fiscal, and the uncertainty around each. Reference data is published by the OECD.
Accounts for what a specific public intervention returned: tax, retained spend, and avoided cost, net of displacement and leakage, with employment reach and community access reported beside them rather than converted into them by assumption. Signal137 produces the evidence the appraisal process already asks for, in a form it can use directly.
Tests the funding decision before commitment: no new spend, the targeted programme, the programme plus infrastructure, each with public cost and modelled return in the same frame. Competing bids for the same limited money ranked on fiscal return per pound committed. Demand137 gives the committee a comparable set of options, not the loudest one.
| Product | Your question | You get | What it changes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Demand137 | Whether to fund a subsidy, a hosting bid, or a destination programme | Public cost and modelled fiscal return in one comparable model, with a stated counterfactual | A funding position that names its own assumptions |
| Demand137 | How to choose between competing bids for the same money | Fiscal return per pound committed, on a common basis across programme types | The committee chooses the strongest defensible return, not the loudest bid |
| Demand137 | What happens if we spend nothing? | The no-new-spend case as the reference the other options are measured against | The counterfactual is the first row of the table, not a footnote |
| Demand137 | Does the fiscal case clear the cost on its own? | Fiscal return stated separately from wider outcomes | Where it does not, the committee weighs wider value explicitly rather than by accident |
| Signal137 | What did the programme we funded actually return? | Tax, retained spend, and avoided cost, attributed and net of displacement | The ex-post result on the same method as the ex-ante case |
| Signal137 | How much weight should wider public outcomes carry? | Employment reach, community access, and regeneration effect reported beside the fiscal figures, not blended into them | Real public benefit neither ignored nor inflated |
| Signal137 | Is this cost-benefit analysis with a new name? | No. Fiscal return and wider outcomes kept separate, with the counterfactual behind each | The committee weighs, rather than accepts a single combined score |
| Signal137 | Can the model show an intervention was not worth funding? | Yes, and it sometimes does | The negative results are what make the positive ones credible |
| Both | Does this replace our appraisal process? | No. It produces the counterfactual, assumption set, and uncertainty range that process already requires | The evidence drops into the existing framework |
| Both | Who holds this, and where? | Model, data, and a trained team inside your jurisdiction | The capability survives the change of official or consultant |
None of the three states what it includes, what period it covers, or whether the money stayed. A footprint figure is only useful when it carries its own definitions, and it is only defensible when it is kept separate from impact.
A major event is a rallying point for civic pride, and just as easily a rallying point for protest. The difference is usually whether residents can see what the event does for their street, in terms they recognise, before the road closures start.
During the 2026 World Cup, host-city hotel rates rose 13% on average. Miami rose 30.3%. New York fell 4.5%. The average was true and useless: it would have told all 16 cities the same thing, and been wrong for most of them.
We turn messy event and tourism data into decisions that help communities grow. Bring curiosity and rigour. We will hand you questions nobody has answered yet.
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