Catalysing healthtech innovation

The issue

One of the Leeds City Region’s ambitions is to accelerate and scale healthtech innovation which drives forward improvements in population health and economic growth.

To achieve this, the innovation ‘pathway’ must be strong at each stage, from discovery to development and finally, deployment.

If not, then innovations can falter, fade or ultimately fail.

The solution

A strong innovation pathway means

• ensuring industry understands the needs of the health and care system and those it cares for
• aligning industry and the health and care system to find innovative solutions
• providing personalised and community-based healthtech solutions
• driving inward investment in healthtech in the region, thus creating inclusive economic growth and job creation
• supporting industry partners to spread their products and services nationally and internationally and in doing so, grow their businesses.

How we are helping

With our regional healthtech partners, we’ve been ‘mapping the gaps’ in that pathway and discussing how we manage them. Having consulted a range of industry, corporate and public sector partners, in 2021 we will provide support to strengthen this pathway.

Using our region’s existing strengths and assets, we:

• are creating a network, with support from industry and large scale employers (anchor institutions)
• will promote industry engagement, headlining our ambition to ‘think big, start small and scale fast’
• are articulating the region’s health needs, and will create and manage a pipeline of products and services for testing and deploying in health and care settings
• are linking with Leeds City Region partners to help embed healthtech industry skills in training and education programmes
• have created new roles to focus on deploying innovation and embedding research into frontline care
• are focusing on where we can make ‘quick wins’ to improve health and reduce health inequalities
• are securing inward investments and company location into the region.

 The impact

Our healthtech partnership will support our ambitions to position Leeds City Region as the engine of health ideas and innovation that can drive levelling up, not just for our region’s economy, but the nation.

It will contribute significantly to the post Covid-19 economic and health recovery.

Our work will help

grow the number of new healthtech start-ups

retain and supporting existing scale up healthtech businesses

attract healthtech companies which can meet the needs of our residents and have the potential to scale their products nationally and internationally

improve people’s health across the Leeds City Region by deploying evidence-based healthtech solutions.

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See more in our 2021 report: Think big, start small scale fast. Please click here.

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