Behind the breakthroughs: what we’ve learned about the UK’s hidden innovation workforce

The research and innovation community has long been captivated by the idea of the lone visionary, the brilliant scientist, the bold founder, the singular “innovator.” It’s a compelling story, but one that obscures a more important truth. Innovation rarely happens in isolation; it emerges through collaboration, challenge, and the combined effort of diverse teams working towards a shared goal.

Our latest research conducted a deep dive into innovation roles within the UK’s private sector workforce. The study expelled the myth of the ‘lone innovator’ and instead revealed that innovation shows up in far more places than formal R&D teams. It lives in product development meetings, in marketing and commercial strategy, in design studios and the day-to-day problem solving that keeps organisations moving forward.

This perspective shares some of the key insights we uncovered while developing our report, Behind the Breakthroughs: Who’s driving innovation in the private sector workforce?

Seeing the “hidden” workforce behind innovation

One of the strongest messages from the research was how much innovation work remains largely invisible.

By analysing around 11,000 worker profilers and speaking directly with business leaders and workforce specialists, we found that most people contributing to innovation don’t have “innovation” in their job titles at all. In fact, 86% of innovation-related roles are “implicit”, meaning that innovation-related activities are a significant part of the role but not formally recognised in role descriptions.

These roles include engineers, data specialists, designer, project manager, marketers, and commercial leads, to name a few. Together, they form cross-functional teams who turn ideas into products, services, and new ways of working.

On a larger scale, much innovation activity is therefore “hidden” in official data because job titles and occupational classifications don’t explicitly label these roles as innovation-related, creating gaps in workforce understanding.

This matters because when roles aren’t clearly recognised, it becomes hard for businesses to identify skills gaps, build career pathways, or access the right support to grow their innovation capability.

How businesses really organise innovation

We also saw clear differences in how innovation is embedded across different organisations.

Larger firms are more likely to have dedicated innovation functions and formal career pathways. Smaller businesses, particularly SMEs, tend to distribute innovation responsibilities across their teams, with individuals often wearing multiple hats.

As one business leader told us during the interviews:

“In small companies, everyone has to be innovative, innovation comes from the culture.”

This flexibility can be a real strength, but it can also make it harder to sustain innovation when resources are stretched or when key individuals move on.

The “missing middle” in innovation skills

Another consistent theme was the challenge of recruitment and progression.

While many businesses reported strong graduate pipelines, there is a real gap at mid-career level for people who can combine technical knowledge with project delivery, commercial awareness and cross-functional leadership. This “missing middle” can make it difficult to take promising ides all the way through to implementation and market impact.

We also found that 40% of businesses surveyed reported having no formal career path for innovation roles, which can limit long-term development and retention of talent.

What helps innovation thrive

Despite these challenges, businesses were clear about what makes a difference.

Strong leadership, supportive cultures and collaboration, both internally and externally, consistently emerged as key enablers. Many organisations spoke about the value of working with universities, Catapults, and industry partners to access expertise, facilities and fresh perspectives they couldn’t build alone.

Across sectors, the top priority for strengthening innovation capability was simple but significant: support to recruit and retain innovation talent.

Why this matters

For us, this research reinforces a powerful idea: innovation isn’t confined to a department, a job title, or a lab. It’s a shared capability, shaped by people, leadership, and culture as much as by technology.

By improving how we recognise and support the full range of roles involved, we can help businesses build stronger, more resilient innovation teams, and ensure that skills systems, training providers, and policy makers are better aligned with what innovation really looks like in practice.

If you’d like to explore the findings in more details, you can reach the full technical report.

This content was produced by Innovate UK

Co-author 1: Debbie Johnson, Head of Innovation, Talent & Skills at Innovate UK

Co-author 2: Abigail Stocker, Lead Specialist, Innovation Research at Innovate UK