IESC Announces 2025 Linowitz Commendation for Innovation, Technology, and Digital Development Winner, T-FAST
The Sol Linowitz Commendation for Innovation, Technology, and Digital Development was established in 2024 to honor one of IESC’s founders, Sol Linowitz, and IESC’s transformational impact in innovation, technology, and digital development. Among many accomplishments, Sol Linowitz helped found Xerox Corporation and served as chair of its board. Xerox, through its technologically groundbreaking Xerox machines, transformed access to information and how people work, growing to become one of the most valuable and impactful American companies of its era. Innovation, technology, and digital development—in both the private and public sectors—are core to IESC’s work in catalyzing private sector growth and employment in the economically developing world. As such, this commendation recognizes an IESC intervention centered upon innovation, technology, and digital development that had, or will have the greatest demonstrated transformational impact.
The 2025 recipient of the Linowitz Commendation is an innovation, technology, and digital development centered innovation that was developed under the Trade-Facilitating Agricultural Systems and Technology (T-FAST) program in Paraguay. The program team led the digital transformation of Paraguay’s national animal quality and health service (SENACSA) by digitalizing laboratory records, automating laboratory information and management into an interconnected online system, and installing secure hyperconverged infrastructure.
At the center of this intervention is a Laboratory Information Management System (LIMS) that digitized all five SENACSA public laboratories, extended online services to as many as 50 private laboratories, and enabled the online management of sample intake, traceability, workflow progression, supervisory review, and reporting. The system eliminated manual bottlenecks, including up to three physical signatures previously required for internal approvals, and connected laboratory systems to Paraguay’s import and export single windows. More than 60 laboratory technicians and administrators received specialized training, ensuring that technology adoption translated into lasting institutional change.
This intervention directly supports IESC’s mission to catalyze private sector growth and create economic opportunity. In Paraguay’s livestock economy, veterinary testing and certification reliability are not merely public-sector performance issues, they are determinants of commercial trust, shipment planning, border readiness, and trade reputation. By strengthening the speed, credibility, and predictability of the regulatory and diagnostic systems upon which private-sector exporters depend, the modernization expanded and accelerated diagnostic and control capacity while making SENACSA’s laboratory system more reliable, transparent, and accountable. These gains in traceability, risk assessment, and digital resilience helped create conditions for expanded market access. Paraguayan beef exports to the U.S. grew by more than 111 percent in value during 2025, reaching approximately US$304 million.
The program team did not merely procure equipment. They assessed needs, aligned support to institutional realities, trained personnel, strengthened sustainability planning, and built an architecture from which SENACSA can continue to expand, exemplifying IESC’s emphasis on durable institutional capacity over one-off transactional outputs.
