Agenda for Impact 2026

Getting your ideal audience to see your message as right for them—quickly—is critical, especially when there’s so much competition for time, attention, and resources. But what do you do when all the reasons your message is “right” aren’t right for those you’re talking to? In this practical and energizing workshop, 25-year message designer Tamsen Webster will show you how to get people invested in all your ideas, starting with the easiest storytelling elements for your audience to identify with: the logic that drives belief.

Learn from Diana Joseph, co-author of the new book Open Innovation Works: Successfully Leveraging Your External Ecosystem for Impactful Change.

You’ll walk away from this practical, hands-on workshop with:

* Key stories to make the internal case for expanding your open innovation practice

* A map of your entrepreneurial ecosystem, the foundation for your partnerships

* Clarity about and draft one of the internal agreements you need for open innovation to thrive

* Answers to your most burning questions about accelerators, incubators, corporate venture capital, one-off partnerships, university partnership, consortia, and open innovation in general

* Your own copy of the guidebook, Open Innovation Works

This year marks Wellspring’s 7th-annual large-scale study of corporate innovation practices and trends. For the 2026 edition, we asked a fundamental question: which innovation practices truly make a difference in company performance?

Some of the results may surprise you. Come join this session for takeaways including:

• Why only one AI practice correlates strongly with innovation success

• Why the H1/H2/H3 framework tends to be inconsequential for driving outcomes

• The specific category of innovation investment that matters most

• Why the #1 hallmark of top innovators is one that few companies take seriously

Join Comcast VP Startup Engagement Laura Plunkett, Chris Hillock of Dell Technologies Capital, and several enterprise AI startups for an inside look at what separates successful corporate-startup partnerships from those that stall. The session will explore real-world challenges, common missteps from large enterprises, and the dynamics that enable startups and corporates to build lasting, high-impact collaborations. Through a highly interactive workshop, participants will share experiences and surface practical best practices, leaving with clear, actionable frameworks — and proven “recipes” — for making these partnerships work.

Join the team from Dell Technologies Capital for dinner. Click here to request a spot. This will be a small group geared to connections and conversation. Please request your spot via email. Please don’t add this to your schedule until you’ve received confirmation.

Join fellow attendees for a dinner nearby.

Get your badge, swag bag, and ask any questions about Impact.

Agility is not just the ability to move fast. It is the ability to sense what matters, align around priorities, mobilize the right partners, engage employees meaningfully, and make decisions that keep promising work moving. In this interactive workshop, participants will assess the structures that support agility in their own organizations, compare practices with peers, and identify practical ways to strengthen co-ownership and engagement.

Join Julia Jackson of Takeda for a free-ranging "birds of a feather" discussion about challenges and what’s working.

What does the world of innovation, new business creation, and product development look like when AI tools play a larger role? We’ll share some high level vision, and get your perspective — but we’ll also demo some of our favorite tools, break out into teams, and do some live building. Come ready to participate!

Join Kofi Gyasi, the CEO of R&D innovation platform NotedSource, for a conversation about reducing friction in innovation workflows, and helping teams move more quickly from early insight to execution. The discussion will cover how organizations streamline coordination, improve decision-making, and leverage external expertise to speed up progress without losing rigor.

Chris Hillock and Julia Beech of Dell Technologies Capital will share the AI trends they are seeing in large organizations — and will invite you to share what’s happening in yours, and get input from the group.

Managing your C-suite is one of the toughest parts of driving innovation and change in a large organization — especially when new C-suite leaders arrive. Join Starbucks veteran, and current Global Chief Food Innovation Officer Rachel Antalek, for an open discussion about building constructive relationships with the C-suite.

Let’s talk about...

What does it look like to bounce around from company to company as an innovator?

What punches can you expect, how should you train, and when is enough enough?

You don’t need to have innovation in your title, be in an innovation arm, or even an innovative company to be an innovator.

ROI – RISK OF INACTION as an innovator, and going against the grain.

What if the uncertainty that your team is working on isn’t the one that will ultimately determine success or failure? Join fellow innovation leaders for an interactive discussion on how teams identify, prioritize, and address risk during “incubation” (that messy middle part of the innovation process). Share experiences, compare approaches, and explore why some projects make faster progress — not because teams learn more, but because they learn what matters most.

Most corporate trend radars take a foresight team weeks or months to produce. In this hands-on session, we’ll build one live, in under an hour. Using our AI-native innovation platform, the room picks a strategic question/industry, and we work it end-to-end: scanning external signals, clustering them into trends and emerging technologies, plotting them on a radar, and generating initial opportunity areas. You’ll leave with a clear view of what AI actually changes in foresight work, where it speeds the cycle up, where it’s good enough to act on, and where senior judgment still needs to step in.

Please bring a laptop to this session.

How do you drive sustainable innovation amid economic pressures, a shifting policy landscape, and global operational challenges? Join New Balance Head of Sustainable Innovation Katy O’Brien for an interactive conversation that will explore how companies are advancing sustainability initiatives, from decarbonization of the supply chain to materials innovation. Katy will share some of the experiences of New Balance, including its recommerce initiative “Reconsidered,” and will look to crowdsource tactics and solutions employed elsewhere, from new business models to custom-built industry consortia.

Get hands-on experience with Reily’s "To / By / Using" approach to ideating. "It’s a clunky name," he says, "but trust me, it is the single most reliable way I’ve found to cut through ambiguity to discover divergent, unexpected solutions. It’s a total mental shift that will literally give your brain a workout, but it’s worth the pain to get there."

If you’re at a company that produces physical products, join us for a free-ranging "birds of a feather" discussion about challenges and what’s working for you.

Saadia Rashia of Technip Energies, a French engineering and technology company, will describe why the future is about platform thinking, rather than one-off technologies, and ecosystems over ownership. It’s less about any single technology, and more about how we design innovation systems to scale faster and with less capital risk.

How do you quickly enable AI, autonomy, and other emerging technologies before the corporate “machine” crushes you? That was the question Brent Segal set out to answer at Lockheed Martin, the $75 billion aerospace and defense giant. The company’s first-ever Director of AI and a former technology scout, Segal recently stood up a high-impact, cross-functional “Rapid Action Team” to identify, prototype and deliver solutions quickly, often in partnership with technology giants like Nvidia and Google. During this session, Segal will describe the journey at Lockheed Martin, and will lead an interactive conversation to compare how others are enabling AI, autonomy, and other emerging technologies.

In today’s rapidly evolving digital landscape, AI programs consistently face a critical hurdle: the gap between promised value and executive confidence. While organizations recognize AI’s transformative potential, senior leadership remains skeptical of investments that deliver abstract benefits rather than concrete financial returns.

This presentation addresses the fundamental challenge plaguing AI initiatives - the chronic overestimation of value that has eroded executive trust in technology programs. Moving beyond the common trap of promoting "efficiency gains" and "time savings per person" that rarely translate to actual cost reductions, this session provides a practical framework for converting intangible AI outputs into direct, measurable P&L impact.

Drawing from real project case studies and leveraging Jobs-to-be-Done theory, attendees will learn proven techniques to:

• Identify and quantify genuine business value from AI implementations

• Transform abstract productivity gains into specific line-item cost reductions

• Build compelling business cases that resonate with financial decision-makers

• Navigate executive conversations with confidence and concrete data

Rather than another theoretical exploration of AI’s future, this talk delivers actionable methodologies for securing leadership buy-in and funding information based on a real success story. Participants will leave equipped with practical tools to bridge the credibility gap between AI potential and business reality, ensuring their technology initiatives receive the executive support they deserve.

If you’re at a company that delivers services, experiences, or software, join Brian Mullen for a free-ranging "birds of a feather" discussion about challenges — and what’s working for you.

Join the crew from Aucctus for conversation and networking over dinner. Space is limited, so please request a spot and wait to receive confirmation before you add this to your calendar.

Join fellow Impact attendees for dinner. One suggestion that doesn’t require reservations - the new Eastern Edge Food Hall, 290 Main Street in Cambridge (about a 5-7 minute walk from Takeda.)

Visit Google’s Cambridge campus and hear about innovation culture and processes at the company from one of the site leads, Director of Engineering Tali Sason.

Please register as space is limited. Google is a short walk away from our other conference venues, at 355 Main Street in Cambridge. 325 side of building (building is 3CC). Please bring an id to enter the building.

Led by Marc Raibert, founder of Boston Dynamics, the RAI Institute unites top talent to develop technology that will increase productivity, contribute to human safety, care for people with disabilities, and help people live their lives more fully. Its major funder is Hyundai of South Korea.

Please register in advance. The RAI Institute is located at 145 Broadway in Cambridge, a few blocks away from our other conference venues.