The Institute for Experiments with Business (Ibex)

In 2025, ACElab researcher Kate Rich initiated a core experiment for her MSCA Fellowship research FRICTIONS, establishing The Institute for Experiments with Business (Ibex) as a new organisation in Europe. Working with collaborators FoAM (HR), Ibex is a research, training, hosting and consultancy platform with a particular focus on business and administrative practice as a place for critical, creative and collective experiments. The remit of Ibex is to form, test and document institutional functions that deliberately probe the boundaries of what is possible, while acting within legal constraints.

To do this, Ibex is engaging in practical experiments to tinker with the materials of everyday business practice – budgets, contracts, corporate form, the investor pitch, CVs, the business plan – with an open curiosity as to how these things could be different. A particular area of interest for Ibex is navigating complex regulatory systems, such as those encountered by small organisations and sole traders who work across national borders in Europe. While European policy advocates for mobility and co-operation, local and national regulations encountered on the ground regularly frustrate these objectives. The first experiment for Ibex will investigate the obstacles, through the surprisingly difficult project of setting up a distributed online shop that trades physical goods between multiple European jurisdictions. 

Instituting Ibex with research partners FoAM, Istria. Photo credit: FRICTIONS.

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