As CRN prepares to hand out its fourth annual Women of the Year Awards, we share how our finalists for CEO of the Year inspire innovation within their organizations.
With the 2026 CRN Women of the Year Gala right around the corner, we’re spotlighting the eight finalists in the CEO of the Year category, which celebrates women who have reached the top of their game, demonstrating exceptional vision, innovation and impact as a CEO. Each finalist shared in her awards application how she inspires innovation throughout her company.
The gala will honor the winners of the fourth annual CRN Women of the Year Awards—spanning 19 individual categories and two company categories—aiming to illuminate women who have made significant contributions to the channel throughout 2026 and the companies that support them.
The finalists were revealed on Sept. 14, and the winners will be disclosed live at the gala on Dec. 8 in New York City (tickets are available here).
Read on for a look what makes these leaders tick and how they foster innovation in others.
Michelle Accardi, Liongard
Innovation at Liongard doesn’t happen in committee. It happens because we’ve built a culture where urgency is a value, not a pressure – and where waiting for perfect is recognized as the enemy of impact.
That starts with how I lead. I don’t believe in building something to death before it sees the light of day. I believe in getting it in front of the people who need it, learning fast, and improving in motion. That mentality has shaped how our entire team operates – from product and engineering to marketing and sales. We move. We iterate. We ask for forgiveness later when we have to, because the cost of waiting is always higher than the cost of adjusting.
Over the past 12 months, that approach produced results that a more cautious organization wouldn’t have achieved. We reprioritized our entire product roadmap mid-cycle to accelerate AI capabilities. We launched LiongardIQ, the MCP Server, and autonomous action features in a compressed timeframe because the market needed it now – not after another planning cycle. We introduced HunterX, giving MSPs the ability to scan external attack surfaces and turn cyber risk visibility into active sales conversations – a capability that didn’t exist in their toolkit before.
We repositioned the company’s entire narrative because the opportunity was in front of us and we weren’t going to let process slow us down. I make hard calls, I move fast, and I expect the people around me to do the same. When something isn’t working, we pivot. When something is working, we accelerate.
Innovation isn’t a program at Liongard. It’s a posture. And it starts at the top.
Melissa Di Donato, Kyriba
Innovation at Kyriba starts with understanding the problem before building the solution. We invest heavily in primary research – our survey of 1,000 CFOs across four countries produced the trust-gap findings that directly shaped TAI’s design, and our 2026 OPR Index, drawing on 1,400 CFOs across eight countries, informs our product roadmap. I take the view that deeply understanding what finance leaders are actually dealing with is itself a form of R&D.
Structurally, the teams at Kyriba are deliberately flat and outcome-focused. We care about what gets built and whether it works. TAI is a good example: the insight that trust was the missing ingredient for AI adoption in finance came from people close to the customer problem, and the cross-functional collaboration that built it – product, engineering, data science, security, compliance, customer success – would have been much harder in a more hierarchical organisation.
We also formalised co-creation with customers through our Co-Innovation Lab. Rather than guessing at what finance leaders need, we put them inside the development process. That keeps our innovation anchored in real operational priorities rather than market trends.
Culturally, I’ve invested in creating an environment where people have the stability and energy to do their best creative work. Our flexible working model is built on trust. We run THRIVE, our global leadership summit, to build cross-functional and cross-geographic connections. Our mentorship programme runs from entry level through to the C-suite, and some of the most useful conversations happen across those levels.
I also believe that the quality of ideas improves when you draw on a wider range of perspectives. Growing female representation in our workforce to 33% and launching the RISE Female Leadership Development Programme aren’t separate from our innovation agenda. They’re part of it.
Prerna Goja, Zensa, LLC
Innovation at Zensa is a discipline, not a department. I foster it through three deliberate practices.
* Before we recommend any technology to a client, we have already tested it ourselves. AI Labs is our internal research and rapid prototyping environment where we pressure-test emerging AI tools against real enterprise constraints data complexity, governance, latency, cost, and hallucination rates. We benchmark LLMs on domain-specific tasks, prototype multi-agent systems on real workflows, and continuously evaluate what is production-ready versus what is hype. Our clients never become guinea pigs. That trust is earned through this discipline.
* Cross-disciplinary teams by design. Zensa is one of the very few firms where data engineers and firmware engineers work on the same project. I built the organization this way intentionally. When hardware and AI expertise converge on the same client problem, the solutions produced are categorically different and better. FORGE itself was born from this cross-disciplinary thinking: a delivery methodology that works equally well for a defense sensor system and an enterprise AI copilot.
* Ownership culture and rapid experimentation. I believe innovation only happens when people feel safe enough to propose ideas that might not work. FORGE engagements include hackathon-style iteration cycles and SME validation loops specifically because fast experimentation beats lengthy planning. I model this from the top FORGE was built by challenging the industry’s standard delivery assumptions and replacing them with something that actually works.
The result is a culture where innovation is not an occasional event it is how we show up every day. It is why we have maintained a 5/5 C-SAT score, a 100% SLA fulfillment rate, and why 85% of our AI engagements reach production within 90 days.
Kate Johnson, Lumen Technologies
I foster innovation by making it safe and expected for teams to challenge old success models. At Lumen, innovation is not a side project or a lab exercise. It is how we are rebuilding the company. We start with customer problems, then ask what has to change in our operating model, our technology, our partnerships, and our culture to solve those problems faster.
That is why culture and strategy have to move together. The Lumen 8 behaviors help create the daily habits that make innovation real: clarity, courage, customer obsession, teamwork, trust, transparency, respect, and a growth mindset. Those behaviors matter because a company cannot build a programmable network with a static mindset. We need teams that move with speed, learn quickly, take smart risks, and stay close to the customer.
Our innovation agenda now shows up in tangible ways: Network-as-a-Service, Multi-Cloud Gateway, Private Connectivity Fabric, Lumen Connect, and Alkira. Together, those moves support the same strategic arc: expand the physical network, scale a digital services platform, and build a connected ecosystem of partners. My job is to keep the company focused on that arc, remove friction, and keep pushing us to reimagine what a network can do for customers in the AI economy.
Maryann Pagano, BlackHawk Data
I foster innovation by creating a culture where people feel brave enough to speak up, trusted enough to try, and supported enough to build something better.
To me, innovation is not a buzzword. It is not something that happens once a year in a strategy meeting, and it is not limited to one team, one title, or one department. Real innovation happens when people at every level of the company feel empowered to challenge the old way of doing things and ask, “How can we make this better?”
That is the culture I have worked hard to build. Creating multiple cross functional teams to help to move the business forward.
As I step more into the CEO role, I made it a priority to create an environment where curiosity, accountability, and collaboration are part of our everyday operating rhythm. I want our people close to the customer, close to the problem, and close to the solution. In our business, the best ideas do not always come from the boardroom. They come from the engineer in the field who sees where a process is broken. They come from the inside sales team who hear customer frustrations. They come from the project manager trying to remove friction. They come from the employee who says, “There has to be a better way.”
I listened. I learned. Then we built. That is what innovation means to me.
Kristin Russell, CBTS
Russell’s approach starts with sustained attention to what customers and employees are actually saying. She has described picking up “breadcrumbs” from those conversations as signals about where the business needs to go that wouldn’t necessarily surface in a strategy offsite. Several of CBTS’s key decisions over the past year originated in those conversations rather than in formal planning processes.
Russell holds a core conviction: in any technology shift, people are the harder problem. Her model for managing change is to identify the 10-20% of employee advocates who, when activated, pull the undecided majority along. She concentrates her energy there rather than on early detractors, enabling the frontline leaders who actually carry change into the organization.
Russell thinks in longer arcs. She believes meaningful transformation takes about three years, and her job is keeping the organization energized for all of it. She breaks strategy into year-long chunks, communicates progress relentlessly, and recognizes people publicly along the way. Change, she has said, takes hold when people can see it working, and her job is making sure they can.
She brings that same standard to hiring. Russell has always evaluated career opportunities on two questions: can she teach, and can she learn? She applies that lens to building teams at CBTS, assembling teams with diverse viewpoints and backgrounds, held together by common values, because she has seen throughout her career that different perspectives produce better thinking on hard problems.
Lynn Smurthwaite-Murphy, Plugable Technologies
I encourage our team to think like business owners, whether from the perspective of our investors, partners, or customers. That mindset helps our individual contributors identify real pain points and opportunities where technology, process improvements, or new solutions can create meaningful value. We also make space for experimentation. Team members are empowered with the resources, trust, and approvals needed to test new ways of working, explore product ideas, and improve outcomes for our stakeholders. Just as importantly, we celebrate both successful innovations and the lessons learned from ideas that may not completly go according to plan. That creates a culture where people are willing to challenge assumptions, move quickly and focus on continual improvement.
Lisa Spelman, Cornelis Networks
Innovation at Cornelis begins with solving problems that matter most to customers. I believe the best ideas emerge when teams deeply understand the real-world challenges organizations face as they scale AI and high-performance computing environments, then have the freedom and support to develop new solutions.
To foster that culture, I encourage close collaboration across engineering, product, sales, and ecosystem teams. By breaking down silos and maintaining a strong connection to customers, OEMs, channel partners, cloud providers, and technology leaders across the industry, we accelerate the path from insight to innovation.
This approach has shaped the development of technologies such as the CN5000 intelligent fabric and CN6000 800 Gbps Ethernet SuperNIC. As AI infrastructure scales, networking has become one of the industry’s most significant performance bottlenecks. Our innovations are designed to deliver industry-leading latency and message rates, empowering organizations to improve utilization, speed up workloads, and increase the efficiency of their infrastructure. By moving data more efficiently, customers can maximize the value of their compute investments while reducing the energy required to deliver AI outcomes.
I also believe innovation thrives through partnership. By working closely with customers, partners, and researchers, we are able to validate new technologies in real-world environments, gather feedback quickly, and bring solutions to market faster.
Most importantly, I ensure innovation remains tied to measurable outcomes. Whether helping enterprises deploy AI more efficiently, supporting advanced scientific research, or enabling partners to deliver differentiated solutions, I challenge our teams to focus on what creates lasting value. That philosophy has helped Cornelis strengthen customer and partner relationships while emerging as a leader in next-generation AI networking.
