MIT’s Phil Budden on Innovation and Serving as a Judge for the InterSystems Impact Awards 2025
Q1. How did your view of organizational innovation shape how you judged the InterSystems 2025 Impact Awards nominees?
I was honoured to be a judge on InterSystems’ “Impact Awards”. It is a great program as large organizations often find it hard to innovate. MIT’s approach to innovation involves matching a problem with a solution. This hypothetical match between a problem and a solution is an idea: the better the match, the more an idea is worth exploring. This approach helps organizations triage which ideas to pursue, ensuring that resources are allocated to initiatives that address pressing business problems and have a viable technology solution with a quantifiable benefit.
Q2. What did you take away from your experience as a judge for the 2025 Impact Awards?
The way that InterSystems has designed its Awards competition really does bring out great examples of its community’s approach to innovation which is exemplary. Many projects were breaking new ground and making a tangible difference using InterSystems’ technology platforms.
Impact Award winners, such as FIS Wealth in financial services and Agimero in supply chain, demonstrated innovative uses of technology that had quantifiable benefits. These examples showed that innovation can have a profound impact beyond just financial metrics, contributing to sectors like healthcare and supply chain optimization.
The judges encourage the InterSystems community to learn from these examples and apply them in their own organizations. By sharing these stories, InterSystems aimed to inspire more applications and innovations in the coming year, making the MIT judging panel’s job next year even more challenging but rewarding.
Q3. Did you notice any patterns in the winners’ innovation initiatives that others could follow?
Even given the wide range of sectors, at differing stages of impact delivery, there were some patterns across the winners. First, any organization can innovate, and it is about more than the technology: it involves leadership. An innovative organization must have an innovation orientation in its senior leadership who should be welcoming of innovation by middle managers and team leaders, as well as other frontline employees. Those in the middle must themselves be committed to innovation and also see that orientation in more senior leaders.]
Q4. What is your perspective on how corporate innovation can be accelerated and spread?
Distributed leadership is crucial for innovation, with senior leaders setting the vision, middle managers enabling the process, and frontline leaders driving the experiments. Middle management, often seen as a bottleneck, plays a vital role in ensuring that innovation is pursued safely and effectively. A culture that encourages innovation, accepts the possibility of failure, and learns from failure is essential for long-term success.
The role of leadership in driving innovation cannot be overstated. The leadership culture at InterSystems is essential to its success, and the company’s leadership takes innovation quite seriously.
InterSystems’ distributed leadership model, where each level of the organization plays a unique role, is worth emulating. At the top, the senior level, the CEO, the vice presidents, et al., has, as its job, to be architecting leaders, but have only 24 hours in the day. They can’t work on every single innovation initiative themselves, but instead set the direction and culture, making it clear that innovation is a priority.
Q5. Where would you suggest people learn more about corporate innovation?
Innovation is crucial for corporations, but it is hard: I therefore try to share insights from my teaching and research about such ‘corporate innovation’, in the following:
Short articles, such as this one.
A variety of courses here.
And now in a new book that I co-authored with Fiona Murray, Accelerating Innovation (MIT Press, 2025).
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Dr. Phil Budden is a Senior Lecturer at MIT’s Management School, in Sloan’s TIES (Technological Innovation, Entrepreneurship and Strategic Management) Group, where he focuses on innovation ecosystems around the world, their key stakeholders, and especially, ‘corporate innovation’. He is co-author with Fiona Murray of Accelerating Innovation.
Resources
Impact Awards 2025. Recognizing Innovation and Excellence Across the InterSystems Community.
Dr. Budden’s Keynote Address, “Impact Awards: Insights on Corporate Innovation,” from READY 2025
Accelerating Innovation. Competitive Advantage through Ecosystem Engagement
Sponsored by InterSystems. Awards selected by an independent panel of judges from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).