The Innovation Coordination Gap
- Paul Egglestone
- Jan 13
- 4 min read
By the time innovation becomes visible in practice, something strange happens.
There is no shortage of activity. No shortage of pilots. No shortage of ideas, evidence, or intent.
What’s missing is connection.
Across health, energy, education and social systems, innovation doesn’t fail because it can’t start — it fails because no-one is responsible for joining the dots once it’s underway.
This is the coordination gap. And it is now one of the most expensive policy failures we have.
From blind spots to broken systems
In the previous post we argued that innovation is often rendered invisible once it moves into practice.
This post goes one step further.
Even when innovation is visible. Even when it is proven, evaluated, and locally successful, it still routinely fails to spread, connect, or persist.
Not because it lacks merit. But because no institutional layer exists to carry it forward.
This is not an invention problem. It is not a measurement problem.
It is a system design problem.
The missing layer: who connects innovation?
Most innovation systems are built around three functions:
Discovery (research, R&D, experimentation)
Translation (commercialisation, IP, spin-outs)
Delivery (services, infrastructure, policy outcomes)
What’s missing — almost everywhere — is a dedicated function for:
coordination across actors, sectors and time.
That coordination work includes:
joining pilots into systems,
linking evidence to policy levers,
aligning incentives across agencies,
carrying learning forward when funding cycles end.
It is slow, relational, and unglamorous.And it is almost never funded at scale.
Australia: fragmented excellence, systemic drag
Australia is rich in pilots and poor in continuity.
Multiple reviews — including those by the Productivity Commission — have shown that Australia generates strong research and promising innovation but struggles with diffusion, adoption and system-wide impact (see Productivity Commission, Innovation Efficiency and Spillovers).
In health, energy and care, governments routinely fund:
short-term demonstration projects,
time-limited trials,
region-specific pilots.
What they rarely fund is:
connective infrastructure across jurisdictions,
long-term intermediaries that persist beyond grant cycles,
system-level capability to absorb and replicate what works.
The result is a familiar pattern: the same pilot appears in different regions under different names, years apart — each time treated as “new”.
This is not inefficiency at the margins. It is structural value leakage.
FASTlab exists precisely because this connective role does not sit comfortably inside universities, government departments, or vendors. Its work sits between — coordinating across energy systems, health research, community governance and place-based practice.
That “between” space is where outcomes are made — and where policy architecture is weakest.
The UK: recognising the gap — partially filling it
The UK is further ahead in recognising coordination as an innovation function — but still struggles to fund it consistently.
Nesta is a clear example. It does not operate as a university, funder, or delivery agency, but as a strategic intermediary — shaping missions, convening actors, synthesising evidence, and working across policy, practice and public value (https://www.nesta.org.uk).
Similarly, organisations like UKRI’s Catapult Network were created to bridge research and application — but most Catapults are still structured around technology sectors, not system outcomes.
Where the UK still struggles is in:
sustaining learning beyond programme cycles,
embedding innovations in public sector routines,
coordinating across health, energy, housing and local government simultaneously.
Even here, coordination is treated as support — not infrastructure.
The US: scale without cohesion
The United States generates innovation at enormous scale — but its fragmentation produces a different version of the same problem.
Agencies such as ARPA-E, NIH, and NSF fund world-leading innovation. But responsibility for diffusion is scattered across states, providers and markets.
In health, the US has powerful evidence from implementation science showing that failure to scale is driven less by technology performance and more by organisational readiness, incentives and governance. Yet funding remains skewed toward discovery rather than system integration.
The result is a familiar paradox:the country that invents the future often struggles to deliver it equitably.
Universities: excellent at discovery, but struggle with coordination
This is where universities matter — but not in the way they usually think.
Universities are exceptionally good at:
knowledge production,
disciplinary depth,
early-stage experimentation.
They are structurally poor at:
cross-sector coordination,
long-term system stewardship,
shared ownership across institutions and communities.
This is not a moral failure. It is a design constraint.
When policy assumes universities can serve as innovation coordinators without changing their incentives, structures or funding models, it is setting the system up to fail.
Coordination requires:
neutrality,
durability,
operational capacity,
accountability to outcomes rather than outputs.
Most universities are not funded or governed to do that work, and shouldn’t be expected to do it by default.
The cost of non-coordination
When coordination fails, the losses are rarely visible on balance sheets, but they are enormous.
They include:
duplicated pilots,
stalled reforms,
exhausted frontline services,
policy churn,
loss of public trust.
More importantly, they include missed compound gains, the benefits that would accrue if innovations were aligned, sequenced, and sustained over time.
Innovation doesn’t just scale linearly. It compounds. But only if systems allow it to.
What policy needs — urgently
If policy makers are serious about outcomes rather than optics, a shift is required.
Not more pilots.Not more announcements.Not more “pathways to impact”.
What’s needed is:
explicit funding for coordination functions,
independent intermediaries with cross-sector mandates,
long-term connective infrastructure, not programme-by-program delivery,
evaluation of system outcomes, not just project outputs.
This is not a marginal reform. It is the missing layer in modern innovation systems.
A system full of rockets — but no flight plan
The problem is not momentum. It’s direction.
Without coordination, innovation becomes noise. With coordination, it becomes capacity.
Comments