SANTA CLARA, CA, UNITED STATES, April 28, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ — The International Society of Service Innovation Professionals (ISSIP), the membership organization advancing Service Innovation for our interconnected world, today announced the winners of the 2025 Excellence in Service Innovation and Distinguished Recognition Awards.
The ISSIP Excellence in Service Innovation award is given to an organization that has designed, developed, or deployed an innovation that will benefit business, society or innovation itself. Submissions undergo rigorous evaluation by ISSIP’s Awards Committee, composed of experts from industry and academia not affiliated with the submitting companies. Submissions are scored on the uniqueness, creativity, technical merit, value generation and impact of the innovative solution in each of three categories: ‘impact to business,’ ‘impact to society’ and ‘impact to innovation.’
“We are pleased to recognize the excellence of service innovation efforts underway in the ISSIP community. This year’s submissions represented the best of the ISSIP community across industry, academia, NGO and government entities, with initiatives calibrated to benefit people, business and/or society in meaningful ways,” said Haluk Demirkan, 2026 President of ISSIP.
“My thanks to the ISSIP community for submitting this year’s highly impressive crop of innovations, and to our panel of judges for making the time to rigorously evaluate, rank and score the submissions,” said Haroon Abbu (Bell & Howell SVP Digital Technology and Data Analytics, and ISSIP Awards Chairperson).
Each award winning organization and team is invited to share their innovation project or initiative with the ISSIP Community, in ISSIP’s Weekly Speaker Series in the coming months. Recordings will be uploaded to ISSIP Youtube and the slides uploaded to ISSIP Slideshare, to foster learning and growth for all.
Award Type: Winner – Impact to Society
Innovation: The Don Norman Design Award
Summary: Many nonprofits, NGOs, Foundations, and government agencies aim for societal benefit. DNDA is unique in emphasizing quality of life above cost and schedule, ensuring that the work is done with and by the community for which it is intended. Many groups claim to use human-centered design (HCD). DNDA focuses upon Humanity Centered Design (HCD+) – The power is in the plus – thinking of the entire system that impacts the work, including the ecology, the environment, the multiple stakeholders, and primarily, the interests, concerns, and capabilities of the community members. We focus on the services that are offered, recognizing that every product is, in actuality, a way of delivering services, but only if the entire broadly based system is considered – how the service impacts the ecological system, all living things, and the culture of the community.
Organization: Don Norman Design Award
Primary Contact: Srini Srinivasan
Don Norman, Srini R Srinivasan, Rao Machiraju, Anil Kripalani, Arlene Harris, Christine Trimble
Award Type: Winner – Impact to Business
Innovation: Cisco AI Assistant for Support, AI Intelligent In-Product CX
Summary: Cisco AI Assistant for Support, AI Intelligent In-Product CX, is an embedded AI engine that moves enterprise support from reactive and portal-based to intelligent and in-product. Cross-functional teams across CX, BU, and product design unified decades of institutional knowledge – drawn from a corpus of 1.7 million support cases per year – into a three-layer architecture that delivers proactive recommendations, AI-powered diagnostic reasoning, and guided resolution directly inside the product workflow. The engine captures product metadata, user context, runs diagnostics, and escalates to human engineers when needed – across cloud, on-prem, and air-gapped environments. With 200,000+ users and 15,000 weekly engagements across multiple Cisco product families, the platform is Cisco Secure Development Lifecycle (CSDL) certified and built to WCAG 2.2 accessibility standards. Its unique combination of proactive intelligence, domain-specific reasoning, and human-centered design establishes a new paradigm for enterprise customer experience and digital resilience.
Organization: Cisco Systems, Inc.
Primary Contact: Nik Kale
Nik Kale, Shankar Ramanathan), Foster Lipkey, Necati Cehreli, Johan Castro, Ullie Versavel
Award Type: Winner – Impact to Innovation
Innovation: iForAI
Summary: iForAI is a unique, repeatable service that closes the gap between an organization’s AI curiosity and full production adoption. It blends community engagement (global and internal AI hackathons), hands-on upskilling, rapid prototyping, and turnkey operational templates so that validated MVPs move rapidly into production with enterprise MLOps, security, and ethical governance built in. Unlike consultancy-only approaches or point tools, iForAI delivers a continuous pathway – discover dozens of prioritized use cases, coach cross-functional teams to build real MVPs, and provide deployable infrastructure and processes that scale. The model emphasizes measurable business outcomes and transfers capability to client teams, which both lowers risk and enables organizations to sustain their own AI innovation.
Organization: iForAI
Primary Contact: Ofer Hermoni
Ofer Hermoni, Asaf Yosifov, Ira Komarova, Coby Sternlicht
Michele Carroll
ISSIP, Executive Director
+1 925-980-1767
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