Impact Awards: Insights on Corporate Innovation

[1:22] But our job this morning is really to celebrate you, InterSystems customers. And it has been a privilege for me to be here the last couple of days, hearing some of the stories about how customers have used the relationship with InterSystems, have used the platforms, have adapted with InterSystems IRIS, and taken forward innovation.

[1:53] This really is one of the key lessons from MIT's corporate innovation program. There's a lot you can do within your own corporation, but when you open the doors to work with others in your community, your ecosystem, you will find new and novel uses. It has been fascinating to get to know the customers, and they are driving towards impact. They are taking the InterSystems platforms in whole new directions and solving all kinds of problems.

[2:25] Impact is a big word. So, what do we mean by impact? Well, a couple of key things. First of all, making a difference. If it's just innovation for its own sake, then that's innovation theater. Using the technology and using your insights really is about making a difference.

[2:48] It's often breaking new ground. You, as the customers out there, working with your own sets of customers, are much more familiar with the problems, whether it's in healthcare or financial services. So, you will be breaking new ground for those customers and clients of yours using these amazing systems.

[3:02] But you're also, even though you may not have realized it, setting an example. The way that you are innovating towards impact is setting an example for others. And that's why I'm so pleased that we get 15 minutes this morning just to celebrate these impact awards, celebrate the winners, but also celebrate the many others out there who are having an impact and were applying.

[3:09] So, we had an MIT judging panel. That's me on the far left. I have never seen my head so big, so I shall move out of the way. Dr. Phil Budden. I'm at the management school, and I focus on innovation. How do large organizations innovate? How do they take the technology and have a positive impact?

[3:33] And I'm delighted also that my new book is right by my rather large head. We have Jose from MIT, who has brought a few books. He has a few copies of the book. So, if you're interested in following up with MIT to understand the relationship that InterSystems has, Jose is right there and has a couple of free copies of the book.

[3:54] But I'm also delighted to have been on the judging panel with two other wonderful colleagues from MIT's management school: Leslie Owens, who'd worked at our center for information systems research and now is at our Trust Center for Entrepreneurship, and Michael Schrage, who's a research fellow and well-published author in these areas.

[4:13] You made our lives really hard. The InterSystems community put up so many amazing applications for the Impact Awards that we have spent weeks winnowing through them. And I am here because the rest of the panel isn't, to say, please make our life harder next year. More of you apply, and more of you innovate in the coming year. That'll be my call to action at the end of this session.

[4:39] So when we talked about impact and the kinds of awards that we wanted to give out, we broke it down into a couple of key areas. So, as you think about perhaps applying or just going out there and innovating, impact can be achieved in a number of ways, and it's important to make sure that it's quantifiable.

[5:00] One of which is revenue generation. Is there something you can do to the top line that generates more revenue by solving business problems with these wonderful technology solutions?

[5:10] But secondly, there's also a cost-saving right in the middle of the accounting sheet. Both of these can help with your overall operational expenses, and most of the categories of applicants that we saw fell into one or the other. So, think: could you maybe put up a project that's on the revenue-generating side or maybe on the cost-saving side?

[5:30] Given the sheer volume of applications and InterSystems' global reach, we had to create regional winners as well – from North America, Latin America, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Asia-Pacific – and then from those we invited all of the regional winners here to this wonderful conference and then announced the world awardees.

[5:54] And it was across six different sectors. One of the benefits of breaking this out is that we covered everything through the complete continuum of health, through also to financial services and supply chain. So, I'll show you in a moment the award winners, but as you think about yourself and the area that you're operating, maybe there's going to be an impact awardee up there that is in your particular category that could be of interest to see what they're doing, so that we can learn together in the InterSystems community. Or maybe you have a project on the books or on the side of a desk back in your organization that maybe you'd like to put forward to be a winner next year.

[6:38] So here they are, and I shall now reveal all of the names, which are much bigger behind me. Hopefully you can read those. I would like us to start with a round of applause to all of those who won an award, whether it was regional or world.

[6:57] As you can see, we had winners across the board, across the categories, from around the world. We had regional winners from Latin America to Asia-Pacific, like The Sabin Group of Brazil, Prince of Wales Hospital in Sydney, Australia, and Speedminer in Southeast Asia.

[7:25] We also had ones from Europe to North America, like KPN Health of the Netherlands, all the way to Netsmart, which you'll hear a little bit more about later in the panel, but also global winners in really important categories. This is not just about health in all of its dimensions. Global winners include FIS Wealth in financial services, AGIMERO in supply chain – really novel use of agentic procurement from that German company – PALTAC Corporation, as well as Cigna in the health plan category.

[8:01] And I just wanted to say, I am clutching here the booklet about those award winners, but this is also accessible to you through your app using your QR code. So you can go and read much more about all these various winners and what they did, which could be inspiring for the sector that you're in, but might also inspire you or some of your staff to put up an application to make the MIT judging faculty's job even harder next year by giving us even more things to look at.

[8:14] Now, I wanted to tell you a little bit about our MIT approach to innovation, which informs the way we teach this, the way we have worked with InterSystems since it was involved.

[8:27] At MIT, we love technology. In fact, in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, MIT is code for a technology place – whether that's Iron Man and Tony Stark, our most famous but not real alum, all the way through to the new series on Disney Plus, Iron Heart, where an MIT student saves the world. True to character, of course.

[8:53] We love technology. We are tech nerds. We are surrounded by some of the world's most amazing technologists. But for us, innovation is much more than technology. In fact, for us, it's about taking ideas from inception to impact. Yes, technology is often an enabler. It's often a solution, but it's much more than just the end result. So, in our approach to innovation at MIT, we see it as a match between a problem and a solution. A hypothetical match between a problem and a solution is an idea – an idea worth exploring.

[9:28] One of the great books about MIT calls it the Ideas Factory. Because our students don't seem to sleep – they just seem to live on Red Bull and pizza. They are constantly coming up with ideas. The challenge for us, of an older generation like the faculty, is that we need to get some rest every once in a while. We can't take forward every single idea that they come up with. And so for us, seeing an idea as a match between a problem and a solution is a way to judge: would this be an interesting idea to explore?

[10:01] This is especially true when I work with large companies, either through executive education or my consulting. You don't have all the time in the world to work on every single idea that could come along from yourself, from your staff, from your customers. And so the problem-solution match is a nice way to start to triage: which ideas should we explore? Is the business problem a pressing one that people would pay us to solve? Is there a solution out there? Perhaps a technology solution from InterSystems' suite of amazing products.

[10:35] And that it's a process. If innovation is just about creativity and having ideas, then that risks becoming innovation theater, and that is time-wasting and, to be honest, rather annoying. At MIT, we're very practical. You need to take that idea, that problem-solution, hypothetical match all the way through to impact. You need to take that idea, that problem, solution, hypothetical match all the way through to impact.

[10:57] Now, we are a management school that has grown out of MIT. We're not a business school. So, a lot of business schools will tell you that impact is just about profit. Well, we think profit's important, or at least bringing in more money than you spend to do what you're supposed to be doing. But we think that's true of private sector, publicly listed companies, but also the public services sector. So, we see impact including profit, but it's more.

[11:24] And actually, having listened to a lot of you or companies here in the InterSystems community, I am struck by the passion not only to generate revenue and profits by getting good revenue or cutting costs, but actually delivering other impacts like health outcomes, patient outcomes, improvements for your community, helping those who are relying on you to stay in business and be good at financial services or insurance or supply chain optimization – some really moving stories about the impact beyond profit. So, we're not against profit. Profit is good, keeps us in business, but there’s a whole variety of other ways of having more impact than just that.

[12:08] The key thing for us is that there’s a series of stages – from the very beginning with the creative inception idea, all the way through to having real-world impact. One thing I really commend InterSystems for is that their awards let us recognize innovation at different stages. We gave awards to people who were just exploring or validating proof-of-concept, but we also recognized later-stage teams whose innovations had already delivered measurable impact — like NHS Glasgow in Scotland, as well as Stanford Health (for cost-savings) in the U.S. and REDSALUD for revenue generation in Latin America.

[12:59] And so as you think about the lessons, you can see these different winners in this booklet are at different stages. And so you can learn insights from them – from what they have the potential to achieve or what they have achieved. But also, as you think about putting in an application yourself, you could think about where we are in this stage of the product and project. And it doesn't have to be a fully finished thing. It could be an early stage that you could share with us here.

[13:25] I say that innovation is more than technology, but technology can definitely help. We saw a wonderful example from Neteera using ambient sensing in a way that was compliant with data rules, but actually gives doctors great ways of understanding what's going on with the patient in the bed. And I encourage you to look up Neteera and see what it is that they've been doing with their impact award.

[13:50] That's our theory of innovation. But being a management school, it's also tied into our theory of leadership. And I commend John and the leadership here at InterSystems for taking the culture of leadership so important and taking it so seriously.

[14:05] The reason that MIT says innovation is more than technology is because the invention of the technology doesn't take it to impact by itself. You actually need leadership to take that forward and actually have a positive impact. And in large organizations like yours, as opposed to startups or student classes, it really requires management and leadership. As we've heard with the stories from these Impact Award winners, it took real grit and determination.

[14:33] John mentioned an example where people were doing this wonderful project on the sides of their desks, doing an eight-hour day after their eight-hour day, just because they were so committed to this.

[14:45] Looking at leadership, I just want to briefly introduce MIT's model of leadership, which is distributed leadership, and it seems to be especially important for innovation. So wherever you find yourself in the leadership pyramid in your organization, you have a role for innovation. In fact, the organizations that innovate best, that adapt the technology and apply those solutions to business problems, are the ones that have leadership distributed throughout the pyramid.

[15:15] So to start at the top, the senior level, CEO, Terry, John, the senior leadership suite – their job is to be architecting leaders. They only have 24 hours in the day. They can't work on every single innovation initiative themselves. Particularly those who also need to practice to be in a rock band. They have other lives and things to do. But the role of those senior leaders is essential. Yes, they set the formal priorities. They set the goal. Do we want to innovate or don't we? And you don't have to innovate. Kodak and Polaroid failed to innovate, and both went bankrupt. It is a choice to be competitive in the market. I hope you will choose strategically.

[16:00] So the senior leaders need to set that direction, but they also need to set the culture, just like CEO Terry has done. You need to say it is okay for our organization to innovate. It is okay not just to focus on business as usual and quarterly results, but actually take time to explore alternatives.

[16:19] That's the top of the pyramid. At the bottom, you have the frontline leaders. These are the entrepreneurial leaders who are actually going to be able to dedicate more of their time to experimenting with InterSystems’ amazing technology platforms – who are going to explore what you can do with InterSystems IRIS and AI, which we will be hearing about later from Sol. What can you do in that context that really transforms the business, so not just delivering business as usual, but getting into that transformation mode? They need to be entrepreneurial.

[16:53] Now in many large organizations, you get the top people saying, "Yes, we're going to innovate. We're going to go be good at this." You'll get your entrepreneurial frontline people saying, "Yes, boss. We're going to press ahead with that."

[17:04] The challenge comes in the middle management. Now, I think middle management gets a bad rap. Most of us are in middle management. We are employees of organizations. It turns out that this is one of the most important segments of the leadership pyramid for innovation. They are the ones in these terms here, enabling leaders who need to enable the strategic vision of the senior leaders and make sure that the entrepreneurial leaders are doing the innovation in a safe way. It's good to start with small, fast cheap experiments rather than betting the entire shop on one of the digital technologies from the last couple of years – crypto or non-fungible tokens.

[17:46] One of the reasons the middle management is there is to say, "Don't do that. Let's look at this generative AI thing. We think this is going to be important." So, middle management, often called the frozen middle or where innovation goes to die, is actually one of the most important levels.

[18:01] So, wherever you find yourself in that pyramid, you have a role – a responsibility – towards innovation in your organization. If you find yourself at a particular time in your company or in your silo as a senior architecting leader, then you need to architect the system. You need to set the culture, set the priorities, and make sure that the middle managers are incentivized to be enabling.

[18:28] If you find yourself in an entrepreneurial leadership role or you have staff in that space, then you need to make sure that they have the bandwidth to actually go and experiment. But most importantly, you need to make sure that your middle management is on board. Yes, it's rational for them to overfocus on business as usual, but that only takes you so far. What you need to do is give them reasons to enable the innovation and take things forward.

[18:53] So, as I prepare to wrap up, I would like you to think about your own innovation in your own organization and just encourage you to think through: are there examples that you can learn from this year's awardees? Could you consider a project within your own organization that could actually take things forward?

[19:15] And this is not only in the for-profit. We have seen amazing examples – for example, at the Department of Veterans Affairs – where innovation is going to make a real difference to that community that has served. And they had to do it as a side hustle; yet it's going to deliver real benefits. Are there things that you can unlock within your organization to help them? And I invite you to make our job as the MIT faculty judging panel even harder by putting up good applications.

[19:44] A couple of tips: one is that it's good if the impact is quantifiable. Whether it's early-stage potential and you're guessing at the potential quantity of benefit through to realized impact, show us some hard numbers about how you're using innovation to change your business. But do think through what you can do because, as leaders, wherever you are in the pyramid, you are the X factor in terms of making that difference.

[20:11] So, congratulations to all of this year's Impact Award winners. We hope to see many more applications next year. And thank you very much for listening to me at the start of the day. Thank you very much.