Building Stronger Connections for Digital Innovation in Social Care

Scotland's social care sector is not short of innovation. The challenge lies in making sure that digital innovation travels, scales and creates impact beyond the organisations and communities where it begins.

Across the country, social care, social work and housing are developing new approaches, solving problems creatively and responding to the changing needs of the people and communities they support. Yet despite this innovation, many promising ideas struggle to move beyond local implementation. Valuable learning remains within individual organisations, successful pilots can be difficult to scale, and opportunities to share evidence and experience across the wider sector are often missed.

This challenge has been highlighted consistently in recent work exploring social care innovation in Scotland. The Social Care Innovation in Scotland report highlighted that existing infrastructure does not sufficiently support innovation adoption and diffusion, while Digital Innovation in Social Care: Priorities and Opportunities for Scotland found that many innovations remain difficult to scale and sustain beyond local settings. Both reports point not to a lack of innovation, but to a lack of the connections, infrastructure and support needed to help innovation flourish across the system. At the heart of this challenge is knowledge exchange.

While social care innovation is happening across Scotland, there remains a gap between where knowledge is created and where it is applied. Valuable learning generated through practice does not always influence research, and equally, research and innovation opportunities do not always reach the organisations that could benefit most from them.

Recent work exploring social care innovation in Scotland has consistently highlighted the need for stronger engagement between social care, colleges and universities. The evidence points to an opportunity to build deeper partnerships that support knowledge exchange, strengthen evaluation, attract research investment and create new opportunities for innovation to travel beyond its original setting (Social Care Innovation in Scotland, Fraser of Allander Institute, 2023; Digital Innovation in Social Care: Priorities and Opportunities for Scotland, 2025). This recommendation is particularly important because universities have far more to offer than research outputs alone.

Academic partners bring methodological rigour, independent evaluation, implementation expertise and access to interdisciplinary networks. They can help organisations understand not only whether something works, but why it works, how it might be improved, and whether it could be replicated successfully elsewhere. They can help turn promising ideas into evidence-informed innovations with the potential for broader adoption and scale. They can also act as a bridge between local, national and international learning, connecting social care organisations to innovations, evidence and approaches emerging in other sectors, countries and contexts.

At the same time, social care brings something equally valuable to the partnership. Practitioners, providers, carers and people with lived experience hold a deep understanding of what matters in practice, the realities of implementation, and the complexities of supporting people in communities. Bringing these different forms of expertise together creates opportunities for stronger research, stronger innovation and ultimately greater impact.

Importantly, stronger collaboration can also help address the difference between duplication of effort and replication of success. Repeatedly solving the same problems in isolation consumes valuable resources and slows progress. Replicating successful innovations in different contexts, however, is often essential for building confidence and evidence. Academic involvement can help distinguish between the two, providing the evaluation and learning needed to support wider adoption while reducing unnecessary repetition.

There is also a compelling financial argument for strengthening these relationships. Social care continues to operate within a challenging financial environment and has historically received significantly less innovation investment than healthcare. At the same time, many promising projects struggle to move beyond pilot and testing phases because of short-term funding arrangements and limited opportunities to secure support for implementation and scale.

Stronger links with academia can help address this challenge. Universities can provide access to research funding, collaborative networks, evaluation expertise and interdisciplinary partnerships that may otherwise be difficult for individual organisations to access. As funders such as NIHR and UKRI increasingly recognise the importance of prevention, community-based support and social care, there is an opportunity to ensure the sector is better connected to research and innovation funding opportunities that have historically been more visible within healthcare.

Recognising these challenges, Digital Innovation in Social Care: Priorities and Opportunities for Scotland (2025) recommended the development of a dedicated innovation pathway for social care. Importantly, the report identified collaboration between policy, practice and academia as central to creating the conditions needed for innovation to move beyond pilots and into wider adoption.

This is one of the reasons the emergence of the Digital Care Collaborative Scotland (DCCS) feels particularly timely. Established to create the conditions for sustainable innovation across social care, social work and housing, DCCS has begun bringing together stakeholders from practice, policy, academia, industry and lived experience to explore shared challenges and opportunities.

Through webinars, workshops and collaborative activities, DCCS is beginning to act as a connector across a landscape that has historically been fragmented. Early activity has highlighted both a substantial appetite for stronger collaboration and a significant gap in the mechanisms available to bring the right people together. To learn more about what DCCS is doing to bring the sector together, take a look at our Delivery Plan and Position Paper. However, no single organisation can close this gap alone.

Creating a stronger knowledge exchange ecosystem will require participation from social care organisations, universities, policymakers, funders, industry partners and communities themselves. It will require creating spaces where different forms of expertise can come together, where learning can be shared openly, and where innovation is viewed not as an isolated activity but as a collective endeavour.

Scotland already has innovative social care organisations. It already has world-leading universities. It already has a growing innovation ecosystem. The challenge, and the opportunity, is creating stronger and more purposeful connections between them.

If we can do that successfully, we have an opportunity not only to generate innovation, but to ensure that innovation is sustained, evaluated, shared and scaled. In doing so, we can reduce duplication of effort, attract new investment into the sector, and create stronger pathways for evidence, learning and innovation to improve outcomes for people and communities across Scotland.

The DCCS has an upcoming workshop represents another step in that journey. More importantly, it provides an opportunity to continue a wider conversation about how social care, academia and innovation partners can work together to ensure that good ideas do not remain isolated, but become part of a stronger and more connected system of learning, improvement and innovation. If this is something that interests you please contact: stephanie.crowe@dhi-scotland.com