Leadership for Innovation in the English NHS: Insights from Policy, Academia and Practice

For innovation to deliver and sustain high quality, affordable and equitable healthcare, policymakers, professionals and researchers agree that leadership is a critical ingredient. Yet, how individual and collective leadership blends with national policy and front-line practice to produce innovation is not well understood. Front-line leadership for innovation remains localized and success is variable, with relatively few innovations scaling up via national accelerator programmes. Most of the innovation is lost in translation of calls for widespread cultural change rather than leadership for innovation. In this chapter, we adopt a multi-level perspective, first reviewing and critiquing how policy since 2010 has framed innovation leadership as a cultural and structural challenge. Following which, we present the academic literature and situate our critique within an empirical example of innovation at an English hospital. Synthesizing these strands of evidence reveal several opportunities whereby innovation leadership may be further strengthened through building upon extant NHS network and leadership infrastructure.