Living Labs are increasingly used in European research and innovation programmes as collaborative environments for experimentation and stakeholder participation. While prior research has examined their participatory and governance features, less is known about their structural role in configuring entrepreneurial ecosystems. This paper examines whether EU-funded Living Lab consortia operate as deliberately designed ecosystem architectures and whether the transition from Horizon 2020 to Horizon Europe is associated with changes in actor diversity, firm and SME embeddedness, and formal coordination. Drawing on CORDIS metadata for 350 projects explicitly labelled as Living Labs, the study constructs project-level indicators of actor diversity, entrepreneurial embeddedness, private-sector coordination, and geographic scope. The observed Horizon Europe sample contains more Living-Lab-labelled projects than Horizon 2020, although Horizon Europe is ongoing and the count should be interpreted as observed-to-date label use rather than final programme expansion. Descriptively, Horizon Europe projects show higher actor diversity, wider geographic breadth, lower firm share, and lower private-sector coordination. In regression models, the actor-diversity difference is positive but marginal, the adjusted firm-share difference is not statistically distinguishable from zero, and the decline in private-sector coordination remains significant. Because private-sector coordination is a proxy for formal entrepreneurial orchestration rather than a direct measure of entrepreneurial influence, the evidence is associational and should be interpreted cautiously. The paper contributes to entrepreneurship and innovation management research by suggesting that policy-designed ecosystems may face a governance tension between ecosystem inclusiveness and formal entrepreneurial agency.

Participatory innovation instruments have become central to contemporary innovation policy, yet their epistemic role remains under-theorised. While such instruments are expected to foster collective learning and transformative change, they are simultaneously embedded in programme architectures that prioritise coordination, accountability, and measurable impact. This paper examines how participation is institutionally positioned across scientific and policy domains, using Living Labs as an empirical lens.Drawing on a comparative analysis of 1,175 peer-reviewed publications and 130 Horizon 2020 projects, the study combines category-based content analysis with centroid-oriented semantic modelling to identify dominant governance configurations. The findings reveal systematic divergence between scientific framings, which emphasise participation as an epistemic resource, and institutional framings, which more often position participation as an implementation device.Building on these results, the paper develops a typology of participatory innovation governance based on two analytical dimensions: the epistemic versus instrumental role of participation and the dominant governance orientation (learning versus coordination). The framework advances innovation policy theory by conceptualising participation as an institutional variable that shapes how innovation systems organise the production and circulation of knowledge.