MHIN UK
Mental Health Innovation Showcase 2026: Partnerships in Action
On 15th September, The Mental Health Innovation Network reconvened for our 15th event and second annual Mental Health Innovation Showcase, delivered in partnership with Harley Street Health District.
Bringing together innovators, clinicians, providers, commissioners, investors, charities and people from across the mental health ecosystem, the Showcase focused on partnerships in action - how new approaches to mental health care are being implemented and scaled in practice.
The UK does not lack ideas for improving mental health care. What remains difficult is creating the conditions in which those ideas can be adopted and scaled across a complex and fragmented system. Throughout the afternoon, discussions returned to the practical realities of implementation: building trust between innovators and providers, navigating procurement and information governance, generating evidence that speaks to the priorities of commissioners and funders, and ensuring that innovation ultimately translates into better experiences and outcomes for people seeking support.
Our Partnerships in Action sessions brought these questions to life through organisations already navigating that journey. Kanu Batra shared the experience of speek’s work with Black Country Healthcare, while Professor Valerie Voon and Samuel Jacobs discussed the partnership between London Psychiatry Clinic and MagVenture.
Five emerging innovators (Tellmi, Meela, Play Well for Life, Univa and InsideOut) then took to the stage to showcase solutions spanning moderated peer support for young people, adult treatment access, early intervention, specialist eating-disorder care, support for carers and AI-enabled coaching. Taken together, these solutions demonstrated the breadth of approaches currently emerging across the mental health landscape, and so reinforced the important theme: there is unlikely to be a single technological or clinical solution to the challenges facing mental health care.
Our stakeholder panel, chaired by Dr Jenny Shand and Katharine Langford, brought together Dr Sarah Hughes CBE, Branislav Trajkovski, Karl Bennett, Aaron Morris, Yasmin Baker, Kate Martin, Shazna Khanom and Dr Ally Jaffee, spanning the charity sector, investment, workplace mental health, private healthcare, the NHS and research.
Their discussion shifted the focus from what innovations can do to what is required to make them work in practice. Implementation emerged as one of the greatest challenges. New technology can initially create additional work for already stretched teams, meaning that onboarding, integration and usability matter just as much as the underlying product. Designing for the realities of the services expected to use an innovation is therefore essential from the outset. Evidence was another recurring theme. Clinical outcomes remain fundamental, but innovators also need to understand the language and priorities of the organisations making adoption decisions. At the same time, the panel challenged simplistic distinctions between digital and clinician-led care when thinking about safety. Safeguarding needs to be designed into new models from the outset, with clear escalation pathways and appropriate clinical oversight. Rather than replacing human care, technology should create the conditions for more of it – reducing administrative burden, improving matching and navigation, and giving clinicians more time to focus on the person in front of them.
This led to a broader question running throughout the afternoon: what do we actually want innovation to achieve?
Technology can make systems faster, but that does not mean care itself should become less human. The opportunity is to use innovation to remove friction around care while strengthening the relationships at its centre. Doing that successfully means meeting services where they currently are, including the realities of stretched capacity, fragmented digital infrastructure and unequal access to technology.
Perhaps the clearest lesson from the Showcase was that innovation moves at the speed of trust. New products can be developed quickly; the relationships, evidence, infrastructure and confidence required to embed them responsibly take longer. Creating connections between innovators and the people commissioning, funding, delivering and experiencing mental health care is therefore not separate from innovation – it is a necessary part of making innovation work.