In episode #213 of The Grant – the EU funding podcast, I’m joined by Jorge Gonzalez, director of ticbiomed, to tackle a very old problem with fresh honesty: why so many EU projects deliver results that nobody adopts. Drawing on 16 years of work in more than 20 projects – many of them cascade funding schemes in digital health – Jorge describes the pattern: strong pilots, motivated clinicians and companies, successful technical results… and then nothing. No procurement, no deployment, just a slide into the valley of death. He argues this is not only a waste of public money, but actively harms innovation culture, especially in public organisations: healthcare professionals invest evenings, weekends and passion into projects, only to be told at the end that there is no budget or plan to actually use what was built.

From there we move into structural reasons and levers for change. On the public side, innovation units join consortia because that’s their “business model”, often without strong alignment with management, budgets or real business owners. On the company side, R&I departments treat projects as well-paid contract work disconnected from product strategy. On the funding side, generous EU programmes, prescriptive call texts and vague impact selection criteria all push towards “innovation theatre” and Frankenstein consortia that exist to win calls rather than deploy solutions. Jorge shares his Impactful Innovation initiative, including policy papers and a conference in Murcia, and explains why he’s lobbying in Brussels for simple but powerful changes: selection criteria that reward credible adoption governance and budget commitments, project officers who follow up on exploitation during and after projects, and visible recognition for consortia that actually manage to deploy solutions at scale. 

Time codes:

01:24 Guest introduction and fly in

06:45 TICBIOMED’s experience on the ground

11:37 When innovation becomes counterproductive

21:29 Structural reasons behind the problem

34:36 What needs to change: from pilots to impact

44:13 Reflections and advice

48:11 The toughest challenge