From Innovation to Impact: Bridging the Gap Between Ideas and Implementation
Courtney Genge, PhD
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AbstractAgeTech innovation has accelerated dramatically, offering new ways to support healthy aging, independence, and connected communities. Yet as the pace of innovation rises, adoption and integration across consumers, health and social systems have not kept up, leaving promising ideas stranded between prototypes and practice. Understanding how innovation moves toward impact—and the systems, policies, and governance structures that enable it—is essential to closing this gap. Drawing on lessons from the National Research Council of Canada’s Aging in Place Challenge program, this keynote explores how we can collectively design pathways and processes that transform innovation into scalable, equitable solutions for technologies that support aging. By building infrastructure that supports trustworthy adoption, we can accelerate the translation of innovation to impact. Although rooted in Canada’s experience, these lessons resonate globally, offering pathways to do things differently and align innovation with real-world implementation.Courtney Genge, PhD (2026). From Innovation to Impact: Bridging the Gap Between Ideas and Implementation. Gerontechnology, 25(2), 1-10
https://doi.org/10.4017/gt.2026.25.2.1694.3