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Innovation through Collaboration: How can the NHS work with Industry and Academia to achieve the 10-Year plan?
Jul 25, 2025
The 2025 NHS 10-year plan lays out an ambitious vision for a more sustainable, integrated, digitally enabled, and patient-centred healthcare system. However, the scale of the transformation outlined in the plan is vast, and with the NHS already being stretched capacity-wise, it cannot viably achieve the outlined changes by itself.
To deliver meaningful, lasting, change, the NHS must embrace a model of collaboration that unites academia, industry, and government in a shared mission to re-imagine healthcare delivery across the UK. This form of collaboration is often referred to as the ‘triple helix’ model and offers a framework for enabling the NHS to harness academic research, technological innovation, and policy leadership in a unified effort.
In this blog, I’ll explore the triple helix through the lens of the 10-year plan, and how this model can unlock new pathways for collaboration, accelerate innovation, and ensure that the government’s long-term vision for the NHS becomes a reality.
What is the ‘triple Helix’?
The triple helix model is a theory of innovation , developed by Etzkowitz and Leydesdorff (1997), that argues and emphasises the dynamic interactions between three key institutional spheres.
- University (knowledge production)
- Industry (wealth creation)
- Government (regulatory and policy frameworks)
The triple helix model is represented in the diagram above, highlighting how the spheres intersect and intertwine with one another, and how innovation and collaboration sit at their core. These facets work with one-another and therefore produce a spiral model of knowledge creation rather than being a linear in their interpretation.
Collaboration may occur between any two of the spheres, or all three at once, but innovation is nurtured at each of the intersections, and thrives in the central core where all three work together. For the purpose of this blog, I have adjusted the ‘government’ sphere to ‘NHS & Government’.
As a summary, the key ideas for this model are:
The triple helix model argues that collaborations between industry, academia, and government entities have the potential to produce better, more innovative, outcomes than work performed independently by any single sphere working in isolation. So, if we look at the 10-year plan, and its goal of “seizing the opportunities provided by new technologies, medicines, and innovations to deliver better care for all patients”, the triple helix model will be instrumental in enabling the required innovation.
How can the Triple Helix Model be a tool for NHS innovation and change?
Educating the Workforce and Advancing Innovation
One of the 10-year plan’s five pillars of transformation is workforce transformation, which includes the upskilling of staff (including AI training for all). This is one of the key areas where academia will be paramount. Universities are central to the future of the NHS—not only as research institutions but as educators of the next generation of healthcare professionals. As the NHS evolves, so too must the training and the education of its workforce. This means re-thinking curricula to include digital health, artificial intelligence, genomics, and data literacy, ensuring that graduates are equipped with the skills needed to thrive in a modern NHS. Thus, universities play a pivotal role in supporting the delivery of the NHS 10-year plan by training the next generation of healthcare professionals to cover the key themes required for enabling change.
Placements and the provision of hands-on experience for the next generation of workforce is another example of where the triple helix is well represented. Universities collaborate closely with both the NHS, and industry, to offer placements that ensure students are prepared for real-world challenges.
These partnerships, whether through placements or the provision of university-level education helps align academic curricula with the evolving needs of the NHS, and healthcare-supporting industry organisations. The alignment of curricula will be essential to lay the foundations for the 10-year plan, ensuring the NHS workforce, and students entering into industry, have the correct skills and knowledge to enable a ‘fit for the future’ NHS.
Research, policy and practice
In addition to educating the next generation of NHS workforce required to fulfil the 10-year plan, universities drive research that informs evidence-based practice and policy.
Collaborations between academia and industry then play a vital role in translating this innovative research into practice. Through clinical trials, health services research, and data science, universities and industry can help identify what works, for whom, and under what conditions. Additionally, embedding academic researchers and/ or industry experts within NHS trusts and Integrated Care Systems can accelerate the adoption of evidence-based innovations, ensuring that new technologies and models of care are both effective and sustainable.
Within NHS partnerships, industry partners also bring speed, investment, and a culture of nurturing innovation to the table. These contributions are particularly valuable in scaling innovations that have been proven effective in academic or pilot settings.
One of the NHS’s longstanding challenges has been its ability to scale successful pilots. Too often, innovations remain siloed, or are abandoned, due to lack of funding or institutional reluctance. To overcome this, we need system-wide learning mechanisms, shared data platforms, and incentives for adoption.
This is where the triple helix comes into play; Academia can help by rigorously evaluating what works, industry can help by scaling those solutions, and the government/ NHS can help by funding and regulating them, as well as working to embed the innovations into everyday practice.
Building a Digitally Enabled NHS
One of the 3 big shifts in the 10-year plan is moving “from analogue to digital”. As such, the government’s plan envisions an NHS where the NHS App becomes the primary interface for patients, where AI becomes every nurse’s and doctor’s trusted assistant, and where care is increasingly delivered remotely. For this vision to become a reality, it will require more than just new tools, therefore collaboration between industry, academia, and the NHS is essential.
When looking at the 10-year plan and how to build a digitally enabled NHS, each sphere of the triple helix brings unique strengths that, when aligned, can drive innovation, efficiency, and better patient outcomes:
It is important, when discussing digital enablement, to loop back to the education of the NHS workforce here, as digital skills must become a core competency for all NHS staff. As such, universities will play a necessary role, embedding digital skills into health-related degrees and industry partners must provide the real-world training and support necessary to up-skill the NHS workforce. Additionally, the NHS must invest in continuous professional development to ensure that the current workforce can adapt to new digital systems and technologies.
The triple helix plays a fundamental role in the digital enablement of the NHS. By collaborating, breaking down silos and aligning incentives, these sectors can co-create digital solutions that are scalable, sustainable, and have ‘fit for the future’ patient care at their core.
Innovation, collaboration and achieving change
The 2025 NHS 10-Year plan offers a compelling vision for the future of healthcare in the UK. However, as this blog has highlighted, it will only succeed if we embrace the triple helix model of collaboration - where academia, industry and the government/ NHS collaborate to educate, enable and empower lasting NHS change. And lastly, at its core, this triple helix of collaboration must foster world-leading innovation, which will be key for building a health system that is resilient, inclusive, and ‘fit for the future’.
IQVIA’s UK&I Healthcare Consulting team strongly believe in innovating through collaboration to achieve the best possible outcomes for patients – want to hear more? Contact us today.