Moving from innovation to implementation: The next chapter for dementia innovation
By Richard Oakley, Associate Director of Research & Innovation
Over the last decade, dementia research innovation has changed dramatically.
We’re seeing advances in diagnosis, growing understanding of brain health and risk reduction, emerging technologies that support independence, and the development of the first treatments proven to slow down Alzheimer’s disease. Dementia innovation is entering a period of unprecedented opportunity.
But there is a growing challenge that the innovation ecosystem cannot ignore.
Innovation only creates impact when people can access it.
Across health and care, the conversation is shifting from: “How do we create innovation? to “How do we galvanise the system to ensure the latest innovations reach the people who need it?
The implementation challenge
For the last seven years, the Alzheimer’s Society Innovation Team focused on a core challenge: bringing the best entrepreneurs, innovators and ideas into dementia.
That work has helped build something that barely existed a decade ago. A growing dementia innovation ecosystem spanning entrepreneurs, researchers, clinicians, investors, care providers, people with lived experience and health system leaders.
Today, Alzheimer’s Society is effectively the UK’s only provider of dedicated programmatic early-stage venture support for dementia innovation. Internationally, only a handful of organisations have a similar focus, while a small number of venture capital firms invest in dementia, most focus on therapeutics and drug development. One notable exception are our partners, the Centre for Ageing + Brain Health Innovation (CABHI) in Canada, which similarly supports the development and adoption of innovations across ageing and brain health.
Through our programmes, we have supported more than 80 innovations, helped products reach over 1.5 million people, and enabled innovators to secure more than £14 million in follow-on funding.
Across healthcare, there is increasing recognition that innovation does not create impact on its own. A technology can prove effective. A service can demonstrate impressive outcomes. A diagnostic tool can show clinical value. But unless it is successfully adopted within health and care systems, either through existing pathways or by transforming how care is delivered, its impact remains limited.
This is what implementation is all about.
Implementation focuses on how proven innovations are adopted, embedded and scaled across health and care systems. It addresses the practical challenges of integrating new solutions into everyday practice, from workforce adoption and clinical pathways to commissioning, evidence generation and system readiness.
This challenge is not unique to dementia. Recently, The King’s Fund’s “Innovation, Economic Growth, Medtech and the NHS” report highlighted a persistent gap between innovation strategy and real-world delivery, arguing that the NHS does not lack innovation, but often struggles to adopt and scale it effectively. The report identifies familiar barriers including fragmented systems, financial pressures, limited capacity, and what it describes as a culture of testing innovations without successfully spreading them.
For dementia, these challenges can be even more significant.
Research published in Alzheimer’s & Dementia argues that the field faces an “implementation cliff”, where promising diagnostics, technologies, treatments and care innovations stall between research and routine practice. The authors suggest dementia research needs to think about implementation from the very beginning, rather than treating adoption as something that happens after innovation is complete. Our new goal is to ensure innovations do not become trapped in pilots, isolated projects, or pockets of excellence.
Building the implementation infrastructure
The King’s Fund reported an important shift that many innovation ecosystems are now grappling with moving from a culture of pilots to a culture of delivery. Among its recommendations are pooling innovation budgets across organisations to tackle shared challenges. Initiatives such as the Longitude Prize on Dementia demonstrate the value of this collaborative approach. Co-funded by Alzheimer’s Society and Innovate UK, and delivered by Challenge Works, the prize combined both financial and non-financial support including expertise, lived experience and a shared ambition.
But as our work evolves, we’re increasingly focused on the next stage of the journey: helping innovations move beyond development and into health and care systems where they can achieve real-world impact. So, we’re building on the foundations established through our early-stage Innovation Programmes: Launchpad, Accelerator and Dementia Innovators, to create a clearer pathway from idea to impact.
We cannot build implementation infrastructure alone; we are working with partners who already operate at the point where innovation meets health and care delivery.
We’re working alongside the UKRI Dementia Challenge team as they develop opportunities around next-generation diagnostic technologies and interventions that could support earlier detection of dementia and help address some of the significant delays people currently face in accessing a diagnosis. By exploring innovations that could shorten the diagnostic pathway, including ambitions to reduce waits that can extend to around 198 weeks in some parts of the system, this work aims to strengthen NHS readiness for future diagnostic innovations.
We’re also strengthening relationships across Health Innovation Networks, the organisations responsible for supporting the adoption and spread of innovation across health and care systems. Through partnerships with organisations such as UCLPartners and other national colleagues, we’re creating stronger pathways for dementia innovations to move from promising pilots to widespread adoption.
Implementation is fundamentally about learning what works in practice. Through collaborations with NHS InSites, including the first bespoke dementia Pitch Perfect session taking place on 15 September, we’re creating opportunities for innovators to connect with real-world sites and implementation experts who can help refine, test and support promising solutions in practice, accelerating the adoption of innovations that can benefit people affected by dementia while improving health and care system performance.
And implementation is not solely an NHS challenge.
Many dementia innovations have significant potential within care homes, community services and social care settings. That’s why we’re broadening our implementation networks and exploring opportunities with organisations such as Bupa and other care sector partners to test and deploy innovations at scale.
Successful implementation is not about a single organisation or setting. It’s about strengthening the whole health and care pathway. People affected by dementia move between healthcare, social care, community services and family support networks, and innovations must work across these interconnected parts of the system if they are to deliver meaningful impact at scale.
Because innovation does not end when a product is built. That’s when the implementation journey begins.
Innovation spotlight
From developing an idea, to generating evidence, navigating health systems and achieving adoption, there are multiple barriers between innovation and impact.
That’s why we’re excited about our new partnership with the NHS Innovation Accelerator (NIA).
Building on the success of our Dementia Innovators Programme in partnership with the NHS Clinical Entrepreneur Programme, this collaboration strengthens support at the implementation and adoption end of the pathway. Together, we’re working to accelerate the spread of dementia innovations across the NHS, attract innovators from adjacent sectors into dementia, and create a more joined-up innovation pipeline.
The NHS Innovation Accelerator is a nationally recognised fellowship programme that helps proven innovations scale through tailored support, mentorship, system access and national networks. Since its launch in 2015, the NIA has supported more than 100 evidence-based innovations to scale across England, with innovations being used across 3,500 NHS sites and impacting over 10 million patients.
Applications for the next cohort of the NHS Innovation Accelerator opened on 17 August and close on 27 September. We are particularly interested in solutions that can improve early detection and diagnosis, access to treatments and non-pharmalogical treatments, and prevention of crisis for people affected by dementia.
This partnership is a step toward a more systematic pathway from innovation to implementation, galvanising the wider health and care system around dementia innovation. We bring dementia expertise, lived experience and innovation networks; the NIA brings proven scaling capability, and together that should help more dementia innovations clear the barriers to implementation.
Looking ahead
Over the last seven years, we’ve helped build the foundations of dementia innovation.
The next chapter is about implementation.
Our ambition is simple: to create a clearer pathway from idea, to evidence, to adoption, to impact.
Because the success of dementia innovation won’t be measured by how many innovations are created. It will be measured by how many reach people living with dementia, carers, clinicians and communities.
Dementia devastates lives. Innovation transforms them.
Implementation ensures that the most promising solutions reach those who need it.
With thanks to insights from Alzheimers&Dementia, The King’s Fund, Pritesh Mistry and Loreen Chikwira, whose recent work on innovation adoption and implementation helped shape some of the thinking on this topic.
