Three ways to fund your innovation ideas

The 2010 Clinical Pathway Group recommendations are now available - all applicants must meet at least one of the recommendations.

The InnovateNoW programme offers three different types of award:

Innovation Bursary Award: The Innovation Bursary Award provides up to £25,000, primarily as a contribution to staff costs, for the adoption of an innovative service within one team or division.
Enabling Change Award: The Enabling Change Award offers up to £250,000 - or up to £50,000 where the applicant is a single organisation - and is designed for situations where the innovation will be implemented across or will affect a range of teams or delivery providers.

PLEASE NOTE THAT THERE WILL BE NO ENABLING CHANGE AWARDS MADE IN THE NEXT ROUND (ROUND 4) OF INNOVATENOW.

Innovation Sharing Award: The Innovation Sharing Award provides up to £5,000 to encourage greater understanding of an innovation, for example to run a workshop, produce written material or allow for staff time to explain its benefit to others.

For details of the type of projects which are eligible see awards criteria.

Innovation Bursary Awards

This award is to enable adoption of: a totally new innovation; an innovation from the NHS or beyond (e.g. industry, healthcare in another country) that has been improved/refined by the applicants; or an innovation that has demonstrable benefits in other organisations but is not regarded as being 'mainstream'.

The award recognises the significant time commitment by clinical teams involved in innovation activity and should be mainly used to back-fill posts (at least 75% of funding application should be for staff back-fill costs).

Commitment to part fund the overall costs by the applicant’s host organisation/other collaborators will be considered favourably.

The funding can be used for:

Implementation and evaluation of an innovative service.
Evaluation of a newly implemented novel service that requires evidence of its effectiveness.
Staff time to lead and contribute towards the implementation, although this does not include ongoing operational costs following implementation.

An example of its use could be the adoption and evaluation of a new monitoring system within one department, or implementing a new service that takes a novel approach to treating patients.

The bursary will be up to a maximum of £25,000 for an application which must be primarily for a contribution to staff costs.

Enabling Change Awards

PLEASE NOTE THAT THERE WILL BE NO ENABLING CHANGE AWARDS MADE IN THE NEXT ROUND (ROUND 4) OF INNOVATENOW.

This award will enable the implementation of an innovation which is likely to have an impact across several teams, specialities, departments, organisations or care delivery providers – for example both in the NHS and the voluntary sector.

The award will be granted for scalable, innovative, fundamental complex-systems change incorporating structures (attributes), processes (sequence of events) and patterns (behaviours). This may include changing organisational boundaries, responsibilities, introducing new roles, tools, teams and so on to bring about transformational change.

The innovative service may have been developed within the NHS organisation applying for the award or by another NHS organisation, provider or company.

Where two stages of funding are required, for example where there is an initial pilot followed by wider implementation, the applicant will need to apply for both tranches of funding at the same time, making it clear that the project will be staged.

This award can be used for:

Addressing specific barriers to adopting an innovation which will realise both local efficiency and quality improvement but also will offer transferable knowledge.
Implementation of the innovation.
Evaluation of the innovation once implemented.
Demonstration of the innovation to other organisations to encourage adoption elsewhere – encompassing all the activities listed in the Innovation Sharing Award section.

Commitment to part-fund the overall adoption costs of the innovation by the applicant's host organisation will be considered favourably.

An example of its use would be transferring services from an acute 'traditional setting' to a non-acute or alternative care setting, redesigning a service across a number of organisations to provide patient-centred care, or adopting a proven method of service delivery from another region or country.

It is anticipated that a return on investment can be demonstrated for Enabling Change Award applications.

Applications should also include a plan to promote or disseminate the innovation once it has been evaluated, and applicants may allocate up to £5,000 of the funds for this purpose. Enabling Change applicants may not apply for an Innovation Sharing Award separately to fund such activity.

The Enabling Change Fund Awards in any year would be up to a maximum of £250,000 for a system-wide, multi-stakeholder application or up to £50,000 for applications involving a single organisation.

Innovation Sharing Awards

This award aims to encourage understanding and adoption of innovation that has evidence of its effectiveness, through facilitation and shared learning materials. This award is to fund a discrete programme of activity to demonstrate the innovation to others and to encourage adoption elsewhere.

Funding can be used for:

Running a workshop to demonstrate how the innovation was developed, implemented and evaluated.
Funding an innovation service leader from outside of the North West to share information with interested organisations within the region.
Developing information material to aid understanding and dissemination, such as leaflets, booklets, posters and a website.
Patient involvement in sharing or promoting the innovation.
Staff time required to educate others about the approach.
Presentation of the innovation at a relevant conference whether by oral presentation or by visual means such as a poster.

Commitment to part-funding the overall adoption costs of the innovation by other organisations will be considered favorabl.

Examples include: training individuals to teach each other a skill required for the innovation to be transferred to other teams or organisations; supporting another organisation in the region to help them adopt an innovative service.

The award will be up to a maximum of £5,000 per application.

Applications for Innovation Sharing awards that are proactive and geared towards: education; tooling people up to change practice; changing mindsets; or increasing patient involvement, are particularly welcome.

N.B. It is possible for applicants seeking an Innovation Sharing award in complementary areas (e.g. with innovations on different parts of the same clinical pathway) to apply for an Innovation Sharing award as a consortium. In this instance both organisations will apply for a seperate Innovation Sharing award, and will refer to the other organisation's Innovation Sharing application. The applications will then be judged together and if funded, the consortium could recieve up to £10,000 (assuming that 2 complementary applications are made, each for the maximum amount of funding of £5,000).