Q Online Visit: Lessons from creating an Innovation Hub

Cambridgeshire and Peterborough ICB have worked with partners to develop an Innovation Hub to enable the systematic testing of innovation approaches, and to facilitate the adaptation and adoption of innovation at pace.

Like many areas, Cambridgeshire and Peterborough face significant health inequalities, and the COVID-19 pandemic further deepened these underlying inequalities.

While Cambridge is home to world leading invention and idea generation, embedding these ideas across the local health and care system in Cambridgeshire and Peterborough proved challenging. The Innovation Hub was created to provide infrastructure and mechanisms to coordinate, monitor and successfully spread innovations that could reduce health inequalities and improve health outcomes.

The Hub brings together and co-ordinates key regional innovation, health and care, and academic stakeholders, to understand what drives health inequality and how implementing innovations may lead to improvements. The Hub also maps existing innovations, targets efforts to adapt successful innovations to the local context and improves system-wide readiness to adopt innovations.

Cambridgeshire and Peterborough ICB are one of four hubs funded through the Health Foundation’s Adopting Innovation programme.

Through this Visit you will:

• Understand the benefits of setting up a distinct innovation strategy
• Hear about how Cambridgeshire and Peterborough ICB have approached setting up an innovation hub, and have created a systematic way of identifying and selecting innovations which are supported by the ICB
• Understand how governance and decision making have been used to tackle challenges in adopting innovations
• Hear about particular initiatives, including challenge prizes and an innovation framework, which have been used to support local innovations