The Edison Awards are among the most prestigious innovation honors in American industry, named for Thomas Edison and recognizing companies and individuals that have demonstrated the most outstanding product or business innovation of the year. In 2016, Cylance won an Edison Award for its AI-powered security technology — recognition that the breakthrough Stuart McClure had been building since 2012 had cleared the bar of credibility that the broader innovation community uses to identify genuine transformation.
The award ceremony gave Stuart a platform to present the case for AI as the future of security to an audience that spanned industries — investors, executives, and innovators from technology, manufacturing, healthcare, energy, and finance. The message was both simpler and more ambitious than his typical security audience required: AI is not just changing cybersecurity, it is changing the structure of organizational risk management, and every enterprise needs to understand this transition whether or not they consider themselves "a security company."
Winning the Edison Award in 2016 was significant validation at a critical moment in Cylance's growth trajectory. The company had proven technical performance against sophisticated threats. The award helped establish Cylance as a genuine innovation story beyond the security industry — contributing to the company's ability to attract top talent, raise capital, and build customer relationships with the global enterprises that would drive it toward the $1.5 billion acquisition that followed three years later.
The presentation at the award ceremony is a characteristic example of Stuart's ability to translate deep technical substance into language that resonates across domains — a skill as central to his leadership as his engineering judgment.