LeadingAge’s Leadership Summit 2026 kicked off Monday, April 20, with a focus on innovation: opportunities to create, develop and execute new ideas in aging services, as LeadingAge President and CEO Katie Smith Sloan shared with the more than 750 attendees gathered at the Omni Shoreham in Washington DC the insights she’s gained about LeadingAge members while touring their communities, meeting with leadership, and talking to residents, clients and staff. Aging services is a unique sector, with opportunities and challenges; the scale of what’s ahead—including profound demographic changes and increased demand for services—is significant. 

“I talk a lot about innovation … the importance of exploring possibilities, trying new ways of working, building new services, or forging new partnerships,” she said. What she sees on the road is members looking ahead and asking: WHAT IF? WHY NOT? HOW ELSE?

Like members, Sloan shared, LeadingAge national is also planning for the future: we know that to stay relevant and continue to provide the value you expect, we need to be nimble. “We have made innovation a core function at LeadingAge,” she said. It’s “not a nice to do, but a need to do.”

And to answer the question on many attendees’ minds—how to bring new ideas into reality, physicist and entrepreneur Dr. Safi Bahcall, author of “Loonshots,” an exploration of “how to nurture the crazy ideas that win awards, cure diseases, and transform industries, shared a host of insights gleaned from real-world examples, including some in highly regulated and complex sectors. 

These include: 

• Love your artists and your soldiers equally
• Celebrate good fails
• Combine two types of experiments: device/product and strategy
• Manage your ABCs: your allies, your blockers, and those who are neither allies, nor blockers, but simply curious.  

Traction, he said, will move ideas. To win over doubters and succeed in getting new ideas into action, it’s critical to “get your boats into the water quickly.” Nurture the mindset and skills of innovation, he encouraged the audience, ending with a personal challenge to every attendee: for each of the next 30 days, conduct one experiment per day. Try something different. Don’t be put off by failure. It is the testing and trying that’s critical. In the words of Rear Admiral and computing pioneer Grace Hopper, “One accurate experiment is with a thousand expert opinions.”