An Innovation Culture Built by 1.25 People

If your innovation team is small and your budget smaller, look at how ideas get into the system and how long they wait once they’re in.

At Clatterbridge Cancer Centre, one of Seamus Coyle’s own innovations took a year to clear every committee it needed. By NHS standards that was fast; in other organizations, comparable ideas took twice as long or stalled entirely.

Clatterbridge, a specialist NHS cancer trust serving 2.4 million people across Cheshire, Merseyside, North Wales and the Isle of Man, had ambition and talented people. What it lacked was a system to collect staff ideas and act on them.

Building that system became the job of two people, whose combined time adds up to 1.25 full-time roles: Simon Bunting, Innovation Manager, and Seamus Coyle, Clinical Lead for Innovation, who also works as a consultant in palliative medicine. In 2024, the pair started the work through a strategic partnership with Pfizer and coaching from Elvin Turner, aiming to produce a blueprint other NHS hospitals could use.

Their mantra came from the 1980s TV show about a small crew working with limited resources: what would the A-Team do?

What they did falls into four moves that other innovation leaders can borrow: clear a faster route through governance, give staff simple ways in, make time for ideas and give executives one shared language.

For a serial clinical innovator like Seamus, coming up with ideas is simple. In his words, “what holds innovators back is the red tape”. Ideas moved through the trust’s committees one at a time, and innovators had to work out who to approach at each stage. The pair call this the “governance grand national,” after the UK steeplechase with its long run of jumps. It was the first thing their action plan tackled.

Seamus’s view is that governance exists to help, so the answer was to get better at working with it. To do that, Clatterbridge set up a cross-divisional innovation committee with members from departments across the trust. Because those members know which governance groups each idea needs, the team sends an idea to several groups at the same time. The idea still goes through every check, with less waiting in between.

A structured pipeline with stage gates gave the committee a clear basis for decisions, and the team moved to honest, measurable reporting on project status. As a result, the team can now turn projects down, and the pair describe themselves as “champion governance jockeys.”

Faster governance helped the ideas already in the system. The bigger problem was the staff who had good ideas yet doubted they counted as innovators.

To lower that barrier, the team stripped innovation back to its basics: a creative idea that adds value. That plain definition made innovation less intimidating and now runs through two entry points.

The first entry point reaches every new employee on day one: the trust induction. Simon runs the innovation slot himself and opens it by telling new starters that Clatterbridge is an innovative organization. “When you walk into that hospital on your first day, you’ve got me talking about innovation,” he says. He then shows examples of what the trust has already built and gives each new starter a toolkit to take away, so they can keep working on ideas after the session.

The second is the Be Innovative Ideas Hub, a submission platform open to patients as well as staff. Every submission goes to the innovation committee for discussion. According to Simon, this culture work raised the trust’s “innovation energy” and made innovation everybody’s business.

In Simon’s experience, few people have their best ideas at work, yet work is where organizations expect them to innovate. An ideas hub gives an idea somewhere to go; staff also need time with someone who can help shape it.

To give staff that time, Simon added a link to his email signature that lets anyone book a 30-minute conversation with him to talk through an idea. He calls the slots Time to Think, and in 18 months staff have booked more than 112 of them.

For ideas that need more voices, the monthly Create group brings clinicians, researchers and administrators together. Anyone can bring an idea, and the group talks it through, advises on next steps and points the person to colleagues who can help. The sessions are informal, and they also build people’s confidence that they can be innovators.

The team’s staff innovation workshop now also runs for universities and businesses, and the income from those sessions goes back into the innovation budget to fund projects.

At the start, the team also found that Clatterbridge’s executives each held a different picture of innovation. The innovation strategy lacked metrics, and the team had a mandate to commercialize with zero funding and an unclear definition of commercialization.

Working sessions with senior leaders, part of the coaching with Elvin, gave the executives the common language they required. The sessions led to an executive innovation commercial committee, made up of the medical director, chief financial officer and chief operating officer. They are available once a month to discuss ideas, give steers and weigh strategic partnerships. The committee reports to the trust board. Clatterbridge also tied innovation to performance metrics, and made a trust executive directly responsible for it.

When they started, Simon and Seamus ran an innovation maturity assessment, which scores 10 dimensions of an innovation ecosystem, from leadership and resources to partnerships and commercialization, on a scale from 0 (ad hoc and fragmented) to 3 (advanced and integrated). Clatterbridge scored itself at level 1. Eighteen months later, it reassessed itself at level 3.

The pipeline now holds PharmaBag, an in-house medicines waste project that secured £600,000 from the National Institute for Health and Care Research and is under way, and SymBot, an AI-enabled chatbot that phones patients to ask about their symptoms, at MVP stage. The team also counts four potential spin-outs on the horizon.

Simon and Seamus treat level 3 as the start of their next mission, not the end of this one. Their list includes protecting the team’s capacity, measuring benefits and value more rigorously, keeping governance proportionate and helping middle managers carry the culture.

They don’t credit the assessment for the progress either. “The assessment gave us the roadmap. People did the work,” they say. What they built is not a silver bullet, in their view, but a shared way of working.

That is also their advice to other innovation teams.