MaRS Attacks

When the NHS sold the Middlesex Hospital in Central London in 2006, we turned it into a very smart block of Candy & Candy luxury flats.  When the Canadian health service had finished with the old Toronto General Hospital in the city’s University District, they turned it into this.  I can’t help feeling we missed a trick.

Toronto’s  MaRS Center opened its doors in 2005, funded by a mixture of philanthropic, academic, local and national money. And by all accounts it has been a success: in the last two and a half years, it has supported 160 entrepreneurs and given rise to a wide variety of innovations, and currently hosts 27 ventures.

There are many reasons for this success, including its innovative approach to raising funds from a wide variety of public and private sources, the determination and vision of its leadership, and the timely support of local government, business and academia. But there are two reasons stand out as particularly relevant for would-be innovators in the NHS.

First of all, MaRS takes a refreshingly holistic approach to healthcare innovation. Too often, innovation in the field of health is taken to mean three things and three things only: drug discovery, device design, and the new clinical practice. And the three areas are all too often viewed in isolation from one another. Of course, all of these are important, and vital for a commercially successful incubator. But to achieve real transformation in the healthcare system like Canada’s or the UK’s, the health innovation agenda needs to include social innovation as well as new technology. Social innovation offers unique opportunities to change the way that healthcare is delivered and drive prevention and self-management rather than just cure.

Alongside its support for biotech and healthcare projects, MaRS also hosts a branch of SIG (Social Innovation Generation), which supports, funds and develops social innovations. This broad definition of health innovation offers an important message for the designers of England’s proposed new Academic Health Science Centres: neglect social innovation at your peril.

The second lesson from MaRS is that its founders didn’t try to create a cluster out of thin air. Rather, they built on the considerable health science resources that were already in place in Toronto’s University District and the University Health Network. Time and time again governments and cities have shown that attempts to make clusters spring from the ground don’t work. Successful clusters build on success – another pointer for the planners of England’s promised new health clusters.

MaRS’s history to date offers an object lesson to the NHS in England as it wrestles with the challenge of how to encourage excellence and innovation, and to the UK’s cities as they consider how to make the most of their own academic resources. Let’s hope we can rise to the challenge.