The social infrastructure of innovation
Nicola Cooper, Head of Digital Futures, Scottish Care
Across Scotland, considerable time, energy and resources are invested in innovation. Projects, pilots and research programmes explore how technology might improve care and support, generating valuable evidence, practical learning and promising approaches. Yet turning those approaches into everyday practice remains a persistent challenge.
It's something I've been thinking about for some time, drawing on my experience across the ageing and care sector, including my previous work at Alzheimer Scotland and my current role at Scottish Care, the membership organisation representing independent adult social care providers. Ideas aren't in short supply, but I'm less convinced we've invested sufficiently in what happens afterwards: the connections, capabilities and collective effort needed to turn them into sustained practice.
Our Care Technologist work offers a useful example. The role supports people to identify and use technology that can help them live well, maintain independence and achieve outcomes that matter to them. Through our work with care providers, we've tested the approach, gathered evidence of its value and identified five conditions influencing its wider implementation, alongside three levels of maturity in how these conditions are developed. The work reinforces something increasingly apparent: evidence that an innovation works is necessary, but insufficient. Implementation also depends on clarity of ownership, organisational capability, resources, alignment with existing systems and the relationships needed to make change possible.
I was reminded of the wider opportunities recently at AgeTechX in Berlin, where founders, startups, investors, financial services and care organisations came together around the growing market for technologies and services that support ageing. I came away energised by the enthusiasm, ambition and investment interest in this space, and reminded of the value of looking beyond our immediate networks.
We often think about innovation in social care in terms of publicly funded programmes, but there is a wider commercial ecosystem with a growing interest in ageing and care. Social care itself is also a significant part of the economy. Research published by the Scottish Social Services Council (SSSC) in 2025 estimated that adult social care contributed £5.2 billion to Scotland's economy in 2022/23, including direct and wider economic impacts.¹ Yet care is still too often discussed primarily in terms of cost, rather than its economic contribution, expertise and potential to stimulate innovation.
Scotland has much to offer, through innovations developed here and opportunities to attract ideas, expertise and investment from elsewhere. Scottish innovators also have opportunities to reach wider markets. Realising that potential requires better connections between those developing solutions, those investing in them and those delivering care and support, alongside navigating the practicalities of procurement, adoption and implementation.
The need to strengthen these connections is becoming more pressing. Technological developments, particularly in AI, are moving faster than many organisations can keep pace with, making it difficult to evaluate, govern and implement new approaches. Meanwhile, demographic change, workforce pressures and financial constraints limit the capacity of services to experiment independently or repeatedly reinvent solutions. Opportunities emerging through data sharing, technology-enabled care and preventative approaches also depend on organisations working across traditional boundaries.
The question is increasingly not just what technology makes possible, but how we develop the collective capability to put it to good use.
For me, this is where the Digital Care Collaborative Scotland (DCCS) has an important role to play.
Bringing together people from across social care, social work and social housing creates opportunities to share knowledge, connect expertise and address challenges that individual organisations might struggle to tackle alone. But collaboration extends beyond knowledge exchange. It can connect care providers with innovators and industry, identify potential partners, align activity with existing programmes and bring together the expertise, influence and resources needed to make things happen.
Accelerating the adoption of approaches that work requires more than evidence of their value. It depends on the relationships and mechanisms that connect promising innovations with the people, resources and opportunities needed to take them forward. DCCS is still developing, and its contribution will ultimately be measured by what happens through these connections and whether it can help provide this social infrastructure of innovation.
