OPINION: Health Innovation Doesn’t Just Need Funding – It Needs Follow-Through 

A new analysis from the Health Foundation has laid bare a challenge that many of us working in health and care innovation have felt for years: we fund a lot of innovation, but we still struggle to realise its full value. 

The piece – “Priorities for supporting health care innovation: an analysis of funding” – is a thoughtful, data-led look at where public funding for health innovation goes, how it’s structured, and the gaps in how it’s coordinated.  

It confirms what many system leaders already know: there is a proliferation of short-term schemes, with too little infrastructure for scaling, sustaining or evaluating innovation in meaningful ways. 

It’s not that we’re not investing in good ideas. We are. The issue is that we too often fund the start of innovation, and not the follow-through. 

We work every day with organisations that have strong ideas, strong intent, and strong frontline leadership, but who struggle to get traction in a system that still incentivises caution, preserves the status quo, and under-resources implementation. 

While it’s encouraging to see the sheer volume of funding aimed at innovation, we must now ask: what will it take to ensure that funding leads to real system change? 

Funding moments versus funding momentum 

The Health Foundation’s findings show that government-backed innovation funding in health and care remains fragmented and time-limited.  

Many schemes target early-stage pilots or short-cycle delivery challenges. Very few are built to support multi-site scale-up, sustained evaluation, or integration into day-to-day operations. 

What does this mean? Frankly, we generate more ideas than we can absorb. We fund more prototypes than pathways. We reward novelty and neglect what it takes to embed, improve and expand. 

If we want a learning, adaptive system, this is not just inefficient – it’s unsustainable. 

What the system needs next 

We believe that if we want innovation to deliver impact, we need to make three major shifts: 

1. Innovation must be managed, not just inspired.
It’s not enough to fund ideas. We need to invest in innovation management – i.e. the hands-on support, systems thinking and operational focus that turn concepts into practice. 

2. Evaluation must be built in, not bolted on.
Impact measurement isn’t a tick-box exercise. Done well, it tells us where value is being created and how we can scale it. Every innovation programme should come with a clear logic model, metrics that matter, and a commitment to learning. 

3. We must focus on adoption and scale, not just acceleration.
The pace of innovation is important, but so is the spread. We know there are brilliant innovations addressing workforce, discharge, diagnostics and digital health. What they lack isn’t evidence, it’s infrastructure to scale. 

A call to align funding with function 

The upcoming NHS 10-Year Plan offers a critical opportunity to course-correct.  

We must move from scattered innovation pots to coherent, longitudinal investment in system-wide transformation.  

That means aligning funding priorities with actual delivery needs and backing teams to make change happen within the constraints of everyday care. 

In the meantime, organisations like FCC will continue to play our role: breaking down barriers, supporting adoption, and providing practical, independent expertise to turn promising ideas into sustained, system-ready impact. 

Innovation in health and care doesn’t just need more funding. It needs focus, follow-through, and a system ready to receive it.