NHS InSites: Learning from Innovation Sites across the NHS

The Government’s 10-Year Health plan is clear that growing the NHS’ capacity for adopting and scaling innovation will be critical to achieving its mission of an NHS “fit for the future”.

NHS InSites is a national programme established to build innovation capacity within the NHS. It provides ring-fenced innovation funding and support to a network of NHS organisations (Innovation Sites) to help them “optimise their ability to nurture, adopt and scale innovation” (NHS InSites Impact Report 2025). 

The impact

Our research with this network - funded by The Health Foundation - highlights a number of practical lessons on how NHS organisations can grow this capability and capacity for innovation adoption from the bottom-up.

These include: 

• how to ensure that innovation activity is focused on real-world problems, driven through engagement with staff and patients;
   
• how to work with a wide range of local partners to mobilise resources in support of innovation;
   
• how to create the right organisational culture and conditions for innovation to take root.  

Our approach

To understand  how NHS organisations can best support innovation, we developed a range of qualitative and quantitative methods to surface practical learnings with the “innovation functions” or teams within each of the 18 NHS Innovation Sites (InSites).

Alongside interviews with key innovation leads and executive sponsors, we created a data collection tool which supported these teams to capture and reflect on key dimensions of how they support innovation across their organisations, including how they agree priorities, mobilise resources, build capabilities and work with partners.

We also brought teams together for an in-person workshop to make sense of the emergent findings and to co-develop the key messages.  

Finally we analysed all of the data and insights, including a wide range of practical case studies, and brought them together in a learning report for use by stakeholders across the NHS and beyond.