Second European Conversation on Testbeds: insights from Malmö
On 9 September, Malmö became the meeting ground for the Second European Conversation on Testbeds, hosted by Ifous, EmpowerED, and GETN. Building on the momentum of the first conversation, this gathering brought together (future) testbed leaders, EdTech innovators, and ecosystem stakeholders to exchange knowledge, share experiences, and continue shaping a collaborative European community around educational testing environments.
Exploring diverse approaches – the EdTech Safari
The day opened with an EdTech safari, where seven testing environments from Finland, Estonia, the Netherlands, Italy, Bulgaria, the UK, and Qatar showcased their models.
The testbeds represented a wide variety of programmes, ranging from government-funded to private initiatives, and included company-driven models, testbeds tackling a city’s concrete innovation challenges, co-creation initiatives, and platforms designed to share testing outcomes in a structured way.
Some testbeds focus only on products with a teaching and learning component, while others also include hardware and administrative systems. One testbed works directly with schools, focusing exclusively on tools already in use. Some operate solely within K12 education, while others extend to higher education and the corporate sector.
This broad spectrum of perspectives highlighted the many ways testbeds can be designed depending on context, needs, and goals.
Key insights and challenges
The conversations throughout the day surfaced several recurring themes and challenges faced across Europe’s testbeds:
1. The funding dilemma
Most testbeds struggle with short-term funding. While piloting budgets allow for experimentation, sustainability requires long-term investment and the capacity to scale. To engage ministries and funders, participants stressed the need to explore diverse business models tailored to different contexts.
2. Navigating diverse education systems and testbed approaches
Education systems across Europe vary widely – from centralised, top-down structures to environments with complete teacher autonomy. This directly affects how testbeds operate and helps explain their different approaches.
For EdTech companies looking to expand across borders, mapping these diverse environments and building bridges between them could help overcome fragmentation. This would provide easier access to testing environments in target countries, offer insights into the impact of solutions in different contexts, and ultimately ease cross-border scaling.
3. Balancing pedagogy and commercial viability
Many testbeds rightly focus on improving pedagogical practices. Yet, for participating companies, commercial viability support is often just as critical. Government-funded testbeds may face restrictions due to competition law, but stronger connections with incubators, accelerators, and other ecosystem actors could help close this gap.
4. No blueprint for testbeds
Setting up a testbed is far from straightforward. Scope, sector, terminology, evaluation methods, and stakeholder involvement all vary by context.
Participants emphasised the importance of transparency in language: terms like “testbed” or “framework” may mean very different things internationally. Some challenges are universal, while others are specific to particular activities and can be solved more easily when clearly defined.
5. Value propositions matter
Testbeds succeed when their value and activities are clearly articulated. Funders need credible proof of long-term impact and returns; operators and ecosystem partners need a clear line of sight to the benefits of regular exchanges, shared databases of testing environments, and structured collaboration.
Moving forward
The Malmö conversation reinforced that there is no one-size-fits-all model for testbeds. Instead, success depends on context, clarity, and collaboration. What unites the European landscape is the shared need to:
develop sustainable funding and business models,
bridge national differences to support EdTech scaling across borders,
strengthen links between pedagogical impact and commercial viability,
create shared understanding through transparent terminology, and
define clear value propositions for all stakeholders involved.
By tackling these challenges collectively, Europe’s testbeds can become a powerful driver of innovation, ensuring that EdTech solutions are tested, refined, and scaled in ways that truly benefit learners and educators.
If you are an EdTech organisation make sure to participate in our short survey on how to improve EdTech testing and evaluation ecosystems in Europe. The survey is still open until 30 September 2025.
