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
Event hosting business case. Living Lab connects event demand, hotel and short-term rental capacity, route capacity, and comparable hosting decisions elsewhere to the specific bid under consideration, and runs it through a model that states its counterfactual, displacement, and deadweight assumptions. Reference data is published by the OECD.
Accounts for a bid or hosting decision already committed or delivered: gross activity through counterfactual, displacement, and leakage to attributable value, so the original business case and the actual outturn can be checked against each other. Signal137 is the answer to the finance director who asks what the fee bought.
Tests the bid before the deadline forces a position: whether to bid at all, at what level of public commitment, what funding structure and risk-sharing to propose. Attributable value split by funding partner, net of displacement. Demand137 sets the bid position and the walk-away point before the sponsor deadline sets them for you.
| Product | Your question | You get | What it changes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Demand137 | Whether to bid at all, and at what level of public commitment | A modelled range against a stated counterfactual, not a single comparator figure | A bid position, and a walk-away point, set before the deadline forces one |
| Demand137 | What funding structure and risk-sharing to propose | Attributable value split by funding partner, net of displacement, leakage, and deadweight | Terms negotiated from a shared evidence base, not a headline pitch |
| Demand137 | What does declining cost us? | The decline position as the reference point, stated rather than assumed | The cost of not bidding is on the table beside the cost of bidding |
| Demand137 | What if we bid and lose? | Bid costs incurred, no hosting benefit, as an explicit downside case | The downside owned, not hidden |
| Demand137 | Can this recommend against bidding? | Yes. A bid that only produces value under optimistic assumptions is reported as that | Advocacy with numbers attached is not a business case |
| Demand137 | Will the supply chain cope with the fans? | Absorptive capacity by supply chain: beds, drivers, caterers, airlift | The kegs and the beds sized before the weekend, not counted after |
| Signal137 | What did the fee actually buy? | Attributed value against the case that funded it, net of displacement and deadweight | The finance director's question answered at audit |
| Signal137 | How does the outturn compare with the business case? | Ex-ante and ex-post on one method | The next bid is priced on what the last one delivered |
| Both | How is this different from the feasibility study our bid team commissioned? | That tests whether the bid is deliverable; this tests whether it is worth doing | Operational and economic cases run side by side |
| Both | Who holds this, and where? | Model, data, and a trained team inside your jurisdiction | The capability survives the change of official or consultant |
A hotel, a resort, or a mixed-use scheme fails underwriting when a single route, a single annual event, or a single source market turns out to be carrying more of the demand case than the committee realised. The dependency is the risk, and it can be measured before signature.
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.
International arrivals to the United States fell 4.2% in 2025 while worldwide travel grew about 4%. Living Lab’s displacement model puts the forgone spending at roughly US$50bn, and about US$10.6bn of it within reach of five economies. Each is limited by a different constraint.
At the Italian Grand Prix, the fleet of guest vehicles arrives on German plates with German drivers. The hospitality guests do not sleep in Monza, which hosts the race. They sleep in Milan, which does not. The town that pays captures a fraction of what the event generates.
Tourism is close to a tenth of the world’s output and employment, and almost every government still plans it in pieces. A country that governs its visitor economy as one system keeps more of what it pays for. On an illustrative US$20bn economy, five points of retention is US$1bn a year.
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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