Grow MedTech has been a major UK programme providing specialist support for innovation in medical technologies, involving a consortium of six universities across the Leeds and Sheffield City Regions.

The programme has been a collaboration between the Universities of Bradford, Huddersfield, Leeds Beckett, Sheffield Hallam and York, led by the University of Leeds and funded through the Research England Connecting Capability Fund from April 2018 to June 2021.

By combining the different strengths of our partner universities in medical and related digital technologies, innovation and commercialisation, we have provided capacity and capability in medtech that far exceeds that offered by a single institution.

Connecting people

We have acted as partnership brokers, proactively connecting people from academia, industry and clinical practice to collaborate on developing new medical technologies. We have linked into the wider network of healthcare innovation support organisations across the regions, to create added value.

Our six, skilled and experienced technology innovation managers were based in our partner universities, but worked collectively as a team, connecting with academics, companies and clinicians from across the Leeds and Sheffield City regions. This specialist innovation support has been helping to put these regions at the forefront of the UK’s medtech sector.

Our ambition was to help develop medical technologies that are better aligned to patient needs by involving patients and people with long-term conditions at every stage of the journey.

Through our partnerships and collaborations, we have been nurturing a vibrant regional, medtech community, connected by our programme of events and communications and supported through training and career development opportunities.

Our track record in successful innovation support is well proven and our model and processes are being further developed with our partners, to be disseminated as good practice in other sectors and regions.

Grow your network

Funding and expertise

We provided funding to support technologies from initial concepts at Technology Readiness Level (TRL) 2 and 3 through to proof of commercial concept at TRL 5. We also provided support for projects at TLR 5+. More importantly, academics and companies could access sector-specialist expertise and advice to help them progress their technologies, create effective partnerships and leverage additional funding from other sources.

Grow your idea

Converging technologies

We have also reached out beyond the traditional boundaries of medtech, to innovators with expertise and technologies in other fields that could be successfully applied to the sector.

Medtech innovation is increasingly involving multiple technologies, combining different disciplines with the opportunities offered through digital technology and Artificial Intelligence: we aimed to help our partners be a part of this exciting future.

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