In episode #236 of The Grant – the EU funding podcast, I’m joined by Christopher Adlung, a PhD researcher at TU Delft working with the adoption, implementation and scaling of telemedicine in low-resource settings. Christopher also works with medtech companies, hospitals and investors on improving the adoption and sustainability of medical technologies. Together, we revisit one of the most persistent questions in EU research and innovation: why do so many promising technologies and project results struggle to create lasting change once the funded project ends? Christopher’s central argument is that impact is not created by developing a technically excellent solution alone. Real adoption depends on understanding the entire ecosystem of people who will select, configure, procure, implement and use it.

From there, the episode becomes a broader discussion about how funding and innovation could be organised differently. We question whether very large consortia are always the best vehicle for supporting innovative SMEs and explore the case for smaller, more accessible grants focused on fewer actors and shorter development cycles. We also discuss the traditional separation between academia, industry and the public sector, and whether new legal and organisational structures could connect their different incentives more effectively. Christopher brings in examples from telemedicine in Bangladesh, where constrained environments have produced practical models combining remote consultations, local health workers, diagnostic technology, pharmacies and mobile services. The result is both a practical and philosophical conversation about adoption, collaboration and how impact should be defined from the perspective of the people and systems affected by innovation.

Time codes:

01:32 Guest introduction and fly in