transcript
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Rethinking Impact – From Funded Projects to Real Adoption
With Christopher Adlung from TU Delft
In this episode, I’m joined by Christopher Adlung, a PhD researcher at TU Delft and a medtech entrepreneur, to rethink what impact actually means in EU-funded research and innovation. Christopher studies the adoption and scaling of telemedicine in low-resource settings, and that adoption perspective shapes our entire conversation. A technology can perform brilliantly in a laboratory or pilot project, but real impact only emerges when the wider ecosystem can and wants to use it. That includes not only researchers and end users, but also procurement teams, administrators, investors, technicians, managers and everyone else whose decisions shape implementation.
We also question whether Europe’s increasingly large and complex collaborative projects are always the right mechanism for innovative SMEs. Could smaller, simpler grants involving fewer partners create faster and more focused progress? Could new structures connect universities, companies and public authorities without forcing them into temporary consortia with very different incentives? Christopher also shares examples from telemedicine in Bangladesh, where innovation has grown from practical constraints and combines digital consultations, mobile health teams, diagnostic devices, pharmacies and local access points. It becomes a wide-ranging conversation about funding design, ecosystems, sustainability and why impact should be measured through adoption and long-term consequences rather than activity alone.
Time codes:
01:39 Guest introduction and fly in
04:37 The Traditional Funding Model – Where Does It Fall Short?
22:20 Beyond Silos – Do We Need New Ways of Organising Innovation?
36:47 Inspiration Beyond Europe
47:46 Rethinking Impact in Future EU Projects
59:00 Reflections and advice
01:06:11 The toughest challenge
