Awards were presented by InterSystems at the READY 2026 conference just outside Washington DC in late April.

Awardees were invited to a VIP Reception on the event's opening night, where they had the opportunity to connect and network with fellow awardees past and present from across the world, as well as InterSystems executives and staff. It was a great way to celebrate all the amazing innovations and foster meaningful conversations among innovators.

Receiving the Impact Awards provides opportunities for broader recognition and publicity for the awardees and their organizations. Each awardee can choose the scope of publicity for their awarded initiative, ranging from the READY announcement to publishing articles and participating in social media announcements and more.

Short descriptions of all the award-winning projects were published at READY 2026 and are included below. Longer articles describing all awardees’ innovations are under preparation now and will be published later this year. These articles will be collected in an innovation book featuring all interested awardees and will also be distributed separately.

Impact Awards 2026 Booklet

Playback requires functional cookie consent. Click the button below to update your cookie settings.

Cookie Settings

Presented by: John Paladino, Vice President of Client Services, InterSystems

A panel of distinguished MIT faculty members evaluated the nominees’ submissions for the 2026 Impact Awards and advised InterSystems on our innovation program. After individual assessments, the judges deliberated as a group at the beginning of April to consider the nominees and select the winners based on the Impact Awards criteria.

Well-known for researching and teaching innovation, Phil Budden, Andrea Kates, and Douglas Carter Williams served as judges, and Manolis Kellis acted as advisor.

• Phil Budden is Senior Lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management, in the Technological Innovation, Entrepreneurship and Strategic (TIES) Management Group, and co-author of Accelerating Innovation.
  
• Andrea Kates is Entrepreneur in Residence, MIT Kuo Sharper Center for Prosperity and Entrepreneurship, and author of From Stuck to Scale. For more information about Andrea, visit andreakates.com.
  
• Manolis Kellis is Professor of Computer Science at MIT, an Institute Member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, a Principal Investigator of MIT’s CSAIL, and the Director of the MIT Computational Biology Group.
  
• Doug Williams helps drive Orbit, the digital entrepreneurship platform at MIT's Martin Trust Center; helped found CentanniPark, a full-service strategic consultancy for mobile and web technology; and has held positions of CTO and VP of Engineering and Product for multiple successful startups.
  

This year’s Impact Awards are the result of an extensive effort by the Innovation Acceleration team in winter and spring 2025-26.

To qualify, an innovation initiative must make use of InterSystems products or data managed by InterSystems products. It must have shown measurable progress over the previous year or as part of a longer-term effort. Nominations are strengthened by data and evidence of significant impact. Innovations that feature current or near-future AI components are given elevated preference.

The Innovation Acceleration team collects nominations through online submissions and live interviews. The InterSystems account managers and others in similar roles provide crucial support: helping to identify appropriate innovation initiatives to nominate, encouraging nominees to supply supporting materials and evidence of impact, and attending the nominees’ interviews to support their project explanations.

Impact Awards are coming again in 2027! Direct customers of InterSystems technology should speak with their account managers about initiatives that might qualify.

Any organization that is powered by InterSystems, either by direct use of our products or by leveraging data managed by our products, to create meaningful change or demonstrable progress in the past year. (Startups and implementation partners are not eligible for the Impact Awards.)