Indholdsfortegnelse for Summer 2019 i Fast Company

When Fast Company introduced the 100 Most Creative People in Business 10 years ago, it was a watershed. Other business publications ranked individuals by wealth or power, but this publication sought to take stock of something intangible and, as then editor Bob Safian explained, offer a “snapshot of the range and depth of creativity across our business landscape.” That first list was prescient. It featured several leaders and executives who have only grown in stature since 2009 (Melinda Gates at No. 2, Reed Hastings at No. 4, J.J. Abrams at No. 14), and relatively undiscovered entrepreneurs and academics who have since become cultural phenomena. Inventor Joy Mangano made the list (No. 77), six years before Jennifer Lawrence portrayed her in the biopic Joy, and cover subject Neri Oxman, an associate…

Local News Apps run by Sinclair, Tribune Media, and other media companies use the promise of localized news to get users to share their data—which is then sold, according to Will Strafach, of Guardian. Local sports apps can be equally porous. “It’s a big problem,” he says. “Tens of millions of people are affected.” Health Many health apps record extremely intimate data about you that, when you study the app’s privacy policy, isn’t well protected, according to Robert Furberg, a health-data researcher at RTI International. It’s not just no-name apps you need to worry about. Even Fitbit sells anonymized data. “Health apps collect data about you,” he says. “And you [ought] to assume that it’s being sold.” Weather Weatherbug, Weather Channel, and other forecasting apps should be used with the…

1 Finding My Voice VALERIE JARRETT Obama’s senior adviser’s book does more than reflect on the golden years of the Obama era—her story is a road map to how we can effect change from the bottom up. 2 Beloved TONI MORRISON I am still unpacking the movie Us. My favorite podcast, Still Processing, pointed me back to this classic novel for clues that might help me to understand the film’s deeper meaning. 3 Winner Takes All ANAND GIRIDHARADAS In an age when brands capitalize on social entrepreneurship, this book exposes the role those same companies play in creating the ills they purport to resolve. 4 The Alchemist PAUL COELHO I discovered this book when I graduated from college, and it helped me survive one of the most confusing, panicked, and…

Today, the average life span of a Standard & Poor’s (S&P) 500 company is less than 20 years. Advances in everything from technology to business processes happen fast, and companies that fail to innovate simply won’t survive. Corning is one venerable brand that has survived and turned its longevity into a business advantage. EVP and Chief Strategy Off icer Jeff Evenson explains Corning has built a “repeatable innovation and growth engine” that draws on more than 100 years of lab reports. Clearly-def ined core strengths, executed by people who care deeply about their craft and clients, have helped the company remain a leading innovator in materials science for more than one and a half centuries. STRENGTH IN SYNERGY Corning’s innovations—damage-resistant cover glass for mobile phones, specialty optical fiber for communications…

THIS WAS NO ORDINARY BOTNET. On a February day in 2017, Tamer Hassan was going about his typical work of monitoring advertising-buying and-selling software for potential security issues when he noticed something strange. Hassan, the cofounder and then CTO of ad-fraud detection and prevention company White Ops, had been tracking a smallish botnet—the term for a network of private computers infected with malicious software and controlled by criminals without the owners’ knowledge—and realized that it had suddenly transformed into a hydra that simply wouldn’t die. When deployed in advertising, a botnet (“robot” + “network”) creates fake websites and uses automated software to pose as real humans and simulate real traffic—siphoning money from companies such as P&G, Unilever, and other big marketers that spend more than $250 billion annually on digital…

Roberto Orosei knew as early as 2008 that he’d found something exciting bouncing off the surface of Mars: bright radar “reflections,” spanning about 12 miles across, roughly a mile below the planet’s southern polar cap. The most plausible explanation was an underground lake of some sort, a potential harbor for extraterrestrial life. But Orosei wanted to make sure, which took almost a decade. Martian polar caps are more complicated, geologically and chemically, than Earth’s, containing rocks and thin layers of dust mixed with ice made of water and CO2, all of which can produce misleading radar readings. He and his team set out to knock down their own findings, developing a computer model to compute all the possible reasons for what they were seeing. “We wanted to leave no possibility…

Late Night With Seth Meyers dominates the 12:35 a.m. slot in Nielsen ratings and attracts a steady 1.8 million viewers per night. “A Closer Look,” its popular politically focused segment, can draw double that across platforms. Here’s more: Main writer for the segment Late Night writer Sal Gentile—a former journalist and improv performer—writes “A Closer Look,” with Meyers and the show’s head writer, Alex Baze, making notes and additions. Nights per week the segment airs Hours in which the fastest-ever segment was turned around “The latest we’ve ever added something to ‘A Closer Look’ was probably following Trump’s press conference defending Brett Kavanaugh, in September,” says Gentile. “I sent in the script for that at 5:30 p.m. and the show taped at 6:30 p.m. And our team was pulling together…

During the government shutdown in early 2019, the USDA announced that it would delay its monthly report on supply, demand, and trade for 20 crops. The result would have caused chaos among farmers, investors, and food manufacturers, so Sara Menker, founder and CEO of Gro Intelligence, released her company’s forecasts for 35 crops (more than 90% of which matched what the government later reported). Gro, founded in 2014, uses artificial intelligence to generate daily agriculture reports, scraping the web for weather forecasts, satellite imagery, and government and industry reports across hundreds of sources and languages. It generates more than 1,000 models, including specific regions and crops, compared to the 55 estimates generated in the monthly USDA report. This data helps companies decide what to sell, where, and at what price,…

Fats Waller, the Beatles, Queen, Adele, Kanye—they’ve all produced albums at London’s Abbey Road, the oldest recording studio in the world. But this pedigree has a downside: “Artists earlier in their careers assume we’re not that accessible,” says Isabel Garvey, who is working to attract emerging talent. She recently opened two smaller pop studios that can be rented at a drastically lower price point, and launched the first free songwriting app, called Topline, in October 2017. “Producers and musicians were collecting their ideas on voice notes on their phone, which is a poor way of doing it,” she says. With Topline, an artist can capture ideas, layer in files, play with the tune, log it, and file it away. The app had 9,000 downloads in its first six months. Garvey,…

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse wasn’t the kind of film that most new studio heads bet on. The superhero’s hold on audiences had been weakening for a decade, and the film’s proposed mix of oldschool animation and CGI was a creative and technological gamble. But Kristine Belson, a DreamWorks Animation and Jim Henson Company vet who became president of Sony Pictures Animation in 2015, was drawn to the project precisely because of its “risky” elements, from an Afro-Latin lead to psychedelic visuals. She also believed in its message of inclusion: “To be successful, we need to pre sent the global audience with different kinds of heroes, [ones who] reflect their reality,” Belson says. She championed the project and made resources available to a crew of more than 800 animators and engineers,…

When Heidi O’Neill, who leads Nike’s retail initiatives across the globe, was planning the company’s next wave of flagship stores, she gave her team a challenge: Could they be as “consumer-centric, bold, and innovative” in creating new shopping experiences as the athletic-wear giant has been in developing sneakers and apparel? The result is Nike’s House of Innovation stores, which opened last year in New York City and Shanghai and reimagine nearly every retail convention as an intimate spectacle. The sprawling, multi-floor emporiums offer appointments with experts who serve as both personal trainer and personal shopper. You can also have your shoes dip-dyed and decaled at craft tables, or behold what Nike says are the largest collections of footwear in the world. The stores are integrated with the Nike app to…

Shimrit Perkol-Finkel, an Israeli marine biologist, created Econcrete to protect and rejuvenate coastlines and marine life. The low-carbon, bioenhanced concrete is custom-made for urban waterfronts, port redevelopment projects, and offshore energy platforms. Its chemical composition provides a more favorable environment for rich and diverse marine life. “I grew up diving,” Perkol-Finkel says, “and I’ve also studied coastal degradation, which can happen because of overexploitation and climate change. We need to build and preserve biodiversity.” In 2018, Perkol-Finkel’s material was used to revive the port of Rotterdam, in the Netherlands, and in the six months since it was installed, canopyforming algae has flourished. Econcrete was also employed for tide pools in New York’s Brooklyn Bridge Park, creating more hospitable habitats for algae, crabs, oysters, and other marine life. Perkol-Finkel’s next project…

Nico Walker served as an army medic for a year during the Iraq War. After he returned to Cleveland, he became an opioid user and eventually robbed 11 banks in four months to pay for his heroin habit. While serving an 11-year federal prison sentence, he wrote a novel on a typewriter in the prison’s legal library. Upon its release last August, it became a New York Times best seller and drew rave reviews for its depiction of the opioid crisis ravaging American neighborhoods. Cherry follows an unnamed narrator from college in Cleveland to the Iraqi desert (where he works as a medic) and back, and his descent into drugs and crime. “I wanted to be truthful about addiction and the realities of war,” Walker says. “I was frustrated by…

Christine McConnell began baking her unsettling desserts—cookies dotted with realistic eyeballs, a Gremlins cake, a pie replica of the chest-bursting scene from Alien, and more—as a hobby. The painstakingly crafted creations (as well as morbid craft projects like a humanskull-shaped powder-puff holder) attracted nearly 500,000 Instagram followers and led to a 2016 cookbook and a gig creating viral marketing cakes for 20th Century Fox. Last year, her macabre humor reached new audiences via a Netflix series, The Curious Creations of Christine McConnell. The scripted show blended Martha Stewart–style baking with campy horror and foul-mouthed Muppets (made by a division of the Jim Henson Company) who planned parties, plotted murders, and produced such jaw-dropping desserts as cookie replicas of shrunken heads. In addition to starring in the show and baking all…

On the island of Borneo, eight young orangutans are the first students in a 247-acre forest school, where orphaned apes learn the skills they need to live independently in the wild. Primatologist Signe Preuschoft, working with the international nonprofit Four Paws and local organization Jejak Pulang, designed the school to replicate the lives that the animals would have led if their mothers had survived to raise them. “We ‘orangutanize’ the human caregiver,” says Preuschoft, teaching workers to do such things as climb trees and recognize forest fruits. The baby apes sleep in leaf-filled baskets attached to branches, and the school is working on a tree-house design similar to treetop nests they would otherwise inhabit. A suspension bridge between trees ferries caretakers to the preserve and accustoms the apes to staying…

Valerie Casey joined Walmart in mid-2018 and oversees 160 designers responsible for developing instore experiences and challenging Amazon’s nearly 50% onlinesales market share. A veteran of design firms (Ideo, Frog, Pentagram), nonprofits (the Aspen Institute, the World Economic Forum), and a consumer-tech company (Samsung), Casey has grown the department by more than 75% and eliminated silos that had led to inconsistent products from one department to the next—what Walmart pharmacists saw on their screens, for example, differed dramatically from what customers saw in the pharmacy app. She created a single design language for approximately 200 of Walmart’s digital services, including both consumer- and employee-facing apps. “When the design looks, feels, and behaves the same, it’s easier for the customer and associate to communicate,” Casey says. She also organized a team…

Since joining Twitch, Amazon’s interactive streaming-video service, in January 2018, Sara Clemens has developed new audiences and revenue sources. Average concurrent viewers are up 35%, and minutes watched are up 42%, to more than 500 billion, thanks to what she calls “headline content” that demonstrates the platform’s potential beyond gaming. Clemens and her team partnered with The Washington Post, for example, to launch the show Playing Games With Politicians and stream congressional hearings. These efforts led to the French government choosing Twitch as the broadcaster for one of its 10-hour grand debates in February, as well as average Americans using the platform to stream coverage of the midterm elections and 2019 State of the Union. Clemens also organized movie and TV marathons, which helped persuade producers to create scripted live…

The Problem: A 2018 Johns Hopkins study found that nearly a quarter of Baltimore’s residents live in “food deserts,” where poverty and lack of retailers make healthy food inaccessible. The Epiphany: When riots over the death of Freddie Gray, a black man fatally injured in police custody, shut down the city, Salvation Army area leader Gene Hogg helped deploy mobile kitchens. He noticed the lack of food suppliers in northeast Baltimore, and prayed. “God woke me up and said, ‘I want you to open a grocery store,’” Hogg says. The Execution: DMG Foods (“Doing the Most Good”), which opened in March 2018, operates out of a 7,000-square-foot former distribution center and is walking distance for more than 2,000 residents, 70% of whom don’t have access to private transportation. It runs…

Live theater has historically been less accessible to people with hearing impairments, because performances usually change from night to night and actors frequently skip or improvise lines, rendering traditional subtitles—prepared in advance at many theaters and broadcast on screens in the back of certain seats—unhelpful. “Theatergoers who are hard of hearing could only choose from certain performances and had to sit in specially designated seats, often away from their friends and family,” says Lisa Burger, who has been executive director of the National Theatre in London for 17 years. Frustrated, she spent two years working with Accenture to develop software that “listens” to dialogue on stage, matches it to other dialogue in the script to ensure it is as accurate as possible, and projects it via Wi-Fi onto the lenses…

When Dominique Jackson—aka Elektra Abundance on the Ryan Murphy–produced FX hit, Pose—tried out for the role of a transgender matriarch of New York’s underground ball culture scene, she’d never played a major role on TV before. Still, having lived some of the same experiences as Elektra, she nailed it. “Jaws were on the floor,” says veteran casting director Alexa L. Fogel, who helped shape such indelible characters as Russell “Stringer” Bell (Idris Elba in The Wire) and Alfred “Paper Boi” Miles (Brian Tyree Henry in Atlanta). For Pose, which premiered last summer and focuses on the black and Latino queer community at voguing and ballroom competitions in the 1980s, Fogel assembled the largest group of openly trans actors ever to appear on a series, many of whom were in front…

Mariana Vasconcelos, the daughter of farmers in Brazil—the world’s third-largest food producer—saw firsthand how hard it is for growers to make decisions regarding irrigation, harvesting, and pest control. “They would rely on intuition and their neighbors,” she says. But as climate change led to droughts and irrigation limitations, “that made me want to bring technology to farmers so they could be more resilient.” In 2014, when she was just 23, Vasconcelos founded Agrosmart, which creates software that uses artificial intelligence to make agricultural predictions based on data from the soil, weather conditions, and the genetic properties of the crop. The software, which resides on farmers’ phones, analyzes the raw data collected from sensors and transmitted via satellite or lower-broadband 3G network to make recommendations on everything from seed placement to…

Most AI-driven biopharma companies parse available data to find drug molecules that target single proteins believed to underlie a disease. This yields a lot of leads, but few pan out. Recursion Pharmaceuticals generates its own data by running 100,000 mini-experiments weekly, robotically dosing samples of “sick” cells with an array of treatments. Recursion then takes a microscopic snapshot of the reaction and uses machine-learning software trained to spot the sick and healthy cells to sort out what works. “It lets you operate without bias,” says CEO Chris Gibson. “The treatments aren’t what a human would have predicted.” Because scanning an image file is faster and cheaper than chemical-based tests, Recursion can collect exponentially more data per hour than a traditional lab. It has compiled one of the largest global databases…

After transitioning from journalism to user experience design, Steph Hay found herself at Capital One helping to create an AI assistant that customers would end up loving so much, one invited it to Thanksgiving dinner. “Eno” is the first gender-neutral AI assistant in banking, bucking the trend among companies to render smart assistants female. “We want our customers to relate with and trust Eno,” Hay says. “To do that in the context of money, something so nuanced and personalized, meant we needed to strip away anything about the character that could inhibit trust. Gender is one of those variables.” Today, mil - lions of customers use Eno—the first natural-language chatbot from a U.S. bank—to manage their accounts, report fraud, and shop online. (Eno is the backward spelling of one, as…

Tech investment firm Andreessen Horowitz announced a $16.5 million Cultural Leadership Fund last fall that’s spearheaded by partner Chris Lyons and features limited partners with unusually high profiles, including Shonda Rhimes, Chance the Rapper, Quincy Jones, and Will and Jada Pinkett Smith. “If you think about who moves culture right now—from sports to music to art and fashion—it’s African Americans,” says Lyons. But often, these cultural power brokers have been on the sidelines when it comes to tech investing. With his new fund, Lyons is both introducing a new set of investors to the kind of deals within Andreessen’s purview and lending star power to startups. Its investments so far include Overtime (a digital sports-media startup), Wonderschool (which helps early-childhood educators open inhome preschools or daycares), and Propel (a free…

On the day Art X Lagos, West Africa’s first international art fair, opens to the public, Tokini Peterside likes to hang out by herself and watch visitors explore the art. The entrepreneur launched the three-day event in 2016 to support Nigerian and pan-African artists and give curators, collectors, and the public better access to them. Last November, 8,000 people visited from 30 countries. The event also featured a music festival and a new prize for emerging artists. How did you decide to start this art fair? I’ve always wanted to contribute to reshaping how the world sees my city, Lagos; my country, Nigeria; and my continent, Africa. I fundamentally believe that it is through culture that this change can be achieved. Has the festival changed the way artists think about…

“When I tell people I’m CEO of a semiconductor company, they go, ‘Seriously?’ People think this business is boring,” says Renee James. But “semiconductors are the foundation. Without them, there’s no Google. What we’re doing for future innovation is a big deal.” Samsung and Intel (where James worked for 28 years) dominate the nearly $500 billion global market for microchips, but James believed a nimble startup could attract talent to create faster and more secure chips for the highperformance servers that are powering the cloud. James launched Ampere in February 2018. Within a year, the company brought its first chip to market and is poised to release a second. More than 20 companies, including Microsoft and Oracle, have placed orders, and the company has grown to 400 employees, with facilities…

Jimmy Chin didn’t set out to make movie history. When he was dangling off Yosemite’s 3,200-foot El Capitan rock face, filming climber Alex Honnold’s attempt at the site’s first ropeless ascent for a documentary called Free Solo, he was just hoping Honnold made it up alive. But when the film debuted, in September 2018, it earned the highest opening per-screen box office of any documentary ever—and then became the most-watched National Geographic Documentary Films premiere in the history of the NatGeo Channel when it premiered in March, drawing 1.45 million viewers. It also won an Oscar. Free Solo, which Chin codirected with his wife, Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, embodies Chin’s human-first approach to nature photography, which he’s honed over almost 20 years capturing images for National Geographic and such brands as…

“Once you have this information, it becomes difficult to understand how we lived without it,” says Davida Herzl, whose 10-year-old company, Aclima, delivers block-by-block air-quality measurements and analysis. Its technology shrinks the work of a trailer-size EPA station down to sensors no bigger than a shoebox, which are installed as networks on buildings or in flfleets of cars. They instantly measure CO2, methane, and other pollutants known to cause health issues and climate change, and use machine learning to generate live maps of where these substances are present and in what quantities. Last fall, Aclima announced a partnership with Google Street View that will put sensors in 50 of its globe-traversing cars in 2019, with the potential to expand to the entire 500-car fleet in the future; each car will…

Janelle Shane is an optics research scientist by day and a humorist by night, documenting her experiments with machine learning on a blog called AI Weirdness. In a typical project, she’ll train a neural network (a type of algorithm inspired by human brains) on a particular kind of data (craft beer names, say, or knitting patterns) then let the AI generate suggestions. These range from plausible to nonsensical, but the funniest fall in between: new names for paint colors included shades like Stoner Blue and Turdly (a light mustard). Shane’s hobby blossomed into editorial collaborations last year with CNN and The New York Times, for which she trained an AI to come up with new Halloween costumes (Zombie Schoolgirl, Donald McDonald), and she has a book due out November 5.…

A small film about two friends in Pretoria, South Africa, who use their expertise in botany to create a special strain of weed, became one of the top-performing films at the South African box office in January. Written, directed, and produced by comedian Kagiso Lediga, Matwetwe was made for just $150,000 and shot in eight days with a cast of mostly drama students. The film may be local even by South African standards—the cast speaks in Pretorian slang—but its humor and humanity resonated well beyond the capital. The movie played at international film festivals, and Lediga is talking to distributors about releasing it in other countries. Lediga says he tries to “make these ultraspecific stories that can be relevant with different people” in all his work, including the 2017 Net…

Can a robot fight cancer? Yes, but it needs to be really, really tiny, which is why Hao Yan and researchers at ASU and China’s National Center for Nanoscience and Technology are building nanobots that are one-thousandth the width of a strand of hair. Constructed from DNA folded into 3-D shapes—a process nicknamed “DNA origami”—these autonomous, molecularlevel machines “go into the blood to find the tumor and kill it,” explains Yan. Crucially, they leave healthy cells untouched. Theoretically applicable to a wide range of cancers, this unique form of nanostructure technology has shown promise in initial tests, doubling the survival rate of mice with cancer. Yan recently cofounded Nanobot Biosciences, an earlystage startup that aims to help get the bots out of the lab and into commercial use. He estimates…

With their tenacious and prescient coverage of the beat of innovation, our Fast Company editorial colleagues uncover trends, opportunities, and insights well before they come into focus for so many others. Many of our marketing partners do the same with their strategic product and brand development efforts. Often, marketers stand at the leading edge of change. And during the past year or so, the human agenda—the personalization and customization of products and services through data, artificial and human intelligence, behavioral insights into customers’ actions and habits—has become a through line of our storytelling and our partners’ consumer engagement. We heard this in our programming at the Fast Company Grill in Austin, during South by Southwest, and we’ll see it come to life on July 9 and 10 in Milan, at…

1 Use Apple’s Own Apps Google’s services, like Google Maps and Chrome, are tempting for their functionality. But Apple Maps and Safari are both far better bets. Apple collects a bare minimum of user data across these services. 2 Change Your Settings All iOS apps offer users the option of having their location tracked all the time, while the app is in use, or never—but you need to go into system settings to make your selections. You can also turn on the Limit Ad Tracking feature, which makes it harder for advertisers to profile you. 3 Put Up a Firewall At $10 a month or $100 a year, the Guardian Firewall app isn’t cheap. But it’s the first iOS service to put a protective server between you and your phone’s…

Some businesses exist for the profit. POET operates for the cause. The sustainable energy leader has been rolling out biofuels and renewable alternative product solutions for more than 30 years. Certainly, running a profitable operation is important to CEO and Founder Jeff Broin, but what really drives him is a genuine desire to change the world. The call for using biofuels instead of fossil fuels grows louder in the effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. As the largest producer of biofuels in the world, POET is working to improve air quality and reverse climate change. The company’s story begins in 1987 in Scotland, South Dakota, where Broin, fresh out of college, purchased a bankrupt plant with his family. In its first year, it produced 1 million gallons of ethanol and…

What’s your best habit, and your worst? I drink a ton of water, but I pick my nose. Do you have a work uniform or wardrobe staple? My Opening Ceremony varsity jacket. It was a gift for walking their runway a couple years ago. I’m usually wearing that, a black Helmut Lang T-shirt, sweatpants from Stateside, and velcro sneakers from Acne or Stella McCartney. How do you unplug? Drink a cup of hot tea while I pick up piles of children’s books, clothes, toys, or bags lying around the house. It’s quite meditative when nobody else is awake. And I have a rule where I don’t look at any devices for an hour before going to bed. What advice would you give your younger self? Stop drinking all that malt…

Instagram @PRINCEJYES This image maker based in Ghana has a vibrancy that perfectly depicts what Ghanaian culture is about. Twitter @AYISHAT_AKANBI Ayishat’s ability to cut through the noise of Twitter is a talent in itself. If you follow her, expect to read tweets that make you cringe and feel inspired at the same time. Podcast MAEKAN Maekan is a website about the creative community and the curious. They occasionally feature podcast episodes inspired by their web content.…

U.S. Soccer Women’s National Team cocaptains Carli Lloyd, Alex Morgan, and Megan Rapinoe play by the same rules with the same ball on the same field as their male counterparts. Yet they brought home a combined $1,725,000 for winning the 2015 Women’s World Cup, while the U.S. Men’s National Team earned more than twice that for losing in the men’s 2014 round of 16. “It pisses me off,” Rapinoe says of the disparity. “But it’s also energizing.” With the 2019 Women’s World Cup beginning this month, the women’s team is taking a stand by suing their employer, the U.S. Soccer Federation, for gender discrimination. “If we don’t do this now, we will not push barriers,” says Lloyd, who scored her first international goal in 2006. The suit addresses compensation and…

Americans are stressed out. That was the conclusion SunTrust reached three years ago when conducting research on financial stress in the U.S. “Eighty percent of Americans lie awake at night [due to] financial stress,” Ken Meyer, SunTrust’s chief technology officer for consumer banking, told the audience at a Fast Company panel sponsored by the Atlanta-based bank in March. “Roughly 40% of Americans don’t have $2,000 in emergency savings. That number grows to 60% with Millennials.” Such insights inspired SunTrust to create onUp (onward and upward), an initiative to bolster consumers’ financial confidence through tips, tools, and community on onUp.com. The panelists discussed how technology—particularly AI—could be enlisted to help reduce our financial worries. Ed Doran, head of product development at Microsoft Research, which devises technological solutions to complex global problems,…

“Speed to market and sustainability are two of the biggest challenges in the [apparel] industry,” says Liz O’Neill, who has overseen the supply chain at Levi’s for the past five years. Often, companies end up sacrificing sustainability for speed by overproducing garments. But O’Neill tackled both issues last year with the launch of Project F.L.X. (aka future-led execution), which uses digital prototyping and lasers to automate the process of applying finishes to jeans (making them look worn or faded). She says the technology is already being used on millions of products, and she plans to scale it to cover 50% of the company’s jeans within the next several years. Here’s how it works. Rapid Prototype: O’Neill introduced software that allows designers to create a highly realistic image of the final…

“AI is being fed directly into the bloodstream of society, and in many cases without sufficient checks and balances,” says Kate Crawford, a professor and cofounder of New York University’s AI Now, the world’s first academic research institute dedicated to the social impact of artificial intelligence. Last year, Crawford partnered with data-viz guru Vladan Joler to create “Anatomy of an AI System,” a map and research paper demonstrating the realworld consequences of developing and manufacturing the Amazon Echo. The 23-by-16.5-foot black-and-white map illustrates how an Echo is made, from the geological processes that create the rare earth metals in the Echo’s chips to the digital laborers who build the training data sets for AI systems to the submarine cables that carry information between servers on different continents. The paper highlights…

Four months after being promoted to general counsel last year, Dev Stahlkopf announced that Microsoft would require all its vendors to provide contract employees who do “substantial work”—from shuttle drivers to food-service workers to receptionists—with 12 weeks of parental leave at two-thirds of their wages, up to $1,000 per week. Stahlkopf spearheaded and designed the change, which aligns with the terms of Washington State’s Paid Family and Medical Leave program. It’s an unusual arrangement in the tech industry, where contract workers often work side by side with full-time employees, but without benefits or other protections. (Microsoft paid a $97 million settlement in 2000, after thousands of temporary employees claimed they were improperly denied benefits.) Why did you introduce this policy? We wanted to use our purchasing power to amplify our…

Apps are getting easier to use largely because they’re getting easier to build: Better software enables designers to experiment with user interfaces without having to enlist coders. But so far, these prototyping tools have focused on visual interfaces. What happens if you want to let users talk to your app? “It’s important for [designers] to be as creative as possible with voice from the beginning,” says Khoi Vinh, who spearheaded a feature inside the Adobe XD design tool kit that adds voice controls to any app prototype. The project began three years ago, when Vinh rallied Adobe to acquire a voicetech startup called Sayspring and incorporate its technology into XD. Today, designers using the program simply need to place an arrow between two of their proposed app screens and type…

There are over 6 million mom-and-pop stores in China, and despite the growth of e-commerce, they still represent 50% of retail sales of consumer packaged goods in the country. But it’s an analog business. Sub-distributors mark up prices. Major CPG brands, meanwhile, struggle to connect with these stores, and middlemen often make their products too expensive for sellers. As a 21-year veteran of Procter & Gamble China, Kevin Lin experienced this firsthand. After joining Alibaba in 2016, he created a solution. Lingshoutong (translation: “integrated retail”) digitizes the supply chain to these corner stores and lets them order via app through Ali baba, which works with brands to create affordable products. Lin’s solution gives Alibaba insights into local, offline buying, and Lin shares ecommerce data with mom-and-pop sellers so they know…

“Koreans work the longest hours in Asia,” says Bom Kim, who lives in Seoul. “The average commute is 58 minutes. The average elementary school student comes home at 10 p.m.” Kim is working to alleviate their stress via the convenience he can offer through his ecommerce company, which allows customers to order from 2 million products (from karaoke microphones to oranges) as late as midnight and receive them by 7 a.m. the next day. To pull this off, Kim and company built their own UPS-style delivery network, which connects the country’s disparate sellers with 60 distribution hubs. Last year, Coupang hit 1 billion deliveries, four years after launch, in part because Kim developed a coldchain operation in just three months in 2018, allowing Coupang to transport fish, frozen items, and…

Barrie, a city of 150,000, north of Toronto, was facing the same issues as Rust Belt cities south of its border when Jeff Lehman was first elected mayor nine years ago: declining manufacturing, little affordable housing, and a coming opioid crisis. But the former urban planner, now in his third term, has grown Barrie’s economy while boosting social services. Here’s how: ▸ By offering discounts on industrial development charges and low industrial taxes, Barrie set a city record last year for industrial building permits issued, and ended 2018 with unemployment below the national average. Many of these businesses have a tech bent, focusing on data management and security, robotics (for Tesla and SpaceX), and more. Investments in shared infrastructure—such as the $5 million committed to build an anechoic chamber at…

Dev Hynes, who performs as Blood Orange, pushes with his words, music, and indeterminate identity against rigid definitions of race, sexuality, and culture. His unstructured aesthetic is his one consistency, whether he’s producing tracks for Solange Knowles, FKA Twigs, ASAP Rocky, or himself. His acclaimed 2018 album, Negro Swan, which has been streamed 40 million times, could be the soundtrack for today’s anxious, fractured, gender-fluid times—insider music for every outsider. There’s a quote attributed to you that’s hard to shake. You said that you’re always surprised when you meet someone who hasn’t been punched in the face. Growing up [in East London], there were some severe bullying moments. Negro Swan is a response to that. I tried to evoke [it] sonically. I’ve always felt when I meet people that I…

Michelle Pfeiffer’s new direct-to-consumer perfume company, Henry Rose—which launched in April—is bringing groundbreaking transparency to a stubbornly opaque industry. Henry Rose offers customers the full ingredient list for each of its inaugural five scents, all certified as safe and environmentally sound by nonprofit watchdogs Cradle to Cradle and the Environmental Working Group, where Pfeiffer is a board member. What inspired these perfumes? Back when people used to smoke on airplanes and on sets, I lived off of a six-pack of Coca-Cola and three packs of Marlboros a day. I quit smoking, and when I became a mom [about 20 years ago], I started to read labels. I stumbled on the EWG’s Skin Deep Cosmetics Database, where you can look up the ingredients of products you are using. When I looked…

Marti Romances’ London-based design firm, Territory Studio, is best known for dreaming up the dazzling computer interfaces that have appeared in sci-fi films including Blade Runner 2049 (remember the floating dashboard of Ryan Gosling’s car?) and six recent Marvel movies. To bring these fantasy graphics into real-world products, Romances created a satellite San Francisco–based consultancy three years ago, offering tech companies access to the firm’s counterintuitive design philosophy. “Instead of thinking function first, we think, What could be visually appealing?” he says. He credits this approach for the Amazfit Verge smartwatch from Chinese hardware maker Huami. Launched in December, its three face modes display the wearer’s biometrics in glowing, radial visualizations that stand out amid a sea of smartwatches modeled after the Apple Watch’s austere visuals. Romances is now working…

Media executive Emil Wilbekin founded Native Son, an advocacy and networking group for professional black gay men, to create “not just a safe space, but a beautiful space,” he says, where members of the community can celebrate their influence. Wilbekin’s three-year-old organization hosts panels and events at companies including Google and has signed on high-profile partners, such as Bloomingdale’s, with whom it has created Pride-themed hats and tees. Reminding brands that black gay professionals are often affluent consumers, Wilbekin lined up HBO, Cadillac, and Belvedere to sponsor the Native Son Awards this past February, which honored author Michael Arceneaux and choreographer George Faison. To raise awareness around the fact that black gay and bisexual men account for a quarter of new HIV diagnoses in the U.S., Native Son helped promote…

Last summer, while Tesla faced scrutiny over delayed Model 3 deliveries and missteps by its CEO, luxury auto giant Porsche partnered with—and acquired a 10% stake in—Rimac Automobili, a 500-person electric-car maker based in Croatia. The company, founded in 2009 by then 21-year-old Mate Rimac, gained prominence for building two of the world’s fastest electric hypercars (the C Two, which debuted in 2018, can reach up to 258 mph), but it also designs, manufactures, and sells batteries and other electric components to companies including Jaguar and Aston Martin. “Our supercars show what we as a company can do,” says Rimac. “But the more scalable part of the business”—and more than 70% of it today, he says—“is producing batteries and power trains [the motor and pieces that move the car] and…

Being able to order dinner, buy a shirt, and book a haircut in the span of a train ride home is nirvana for consumers. But for the merchants fielding those digital requests while also trying to run a brickand-mortar business, it’s a nightmare. Alyssa Henry, who oversees the engineering and product teams for payments company Square, has spent the past year creating solutions for them. “A lot of our ideas come from observing how [businesses] are hacking the experience that we’ve already given them,” she says. Last year, she turned these observations into new products. Square Online Store: Using technology from Weebly, which Square acquired for $365 million in 2018, this new e-commerce product allows sellers to quickly erect a sophisticated online storefront, sync their online and offline inventory, calculate…

Gabriel Weinberg’s privacy-focused search engine doesn’t track users or log their search histories. What it does is offer peace of mind. Weinberg created it 11 years ago after hearing, as an angel investor, pitch after pitch from ad-tech startups about how they could slice, dice, and target groups of users using deeply personal data. “I thought, This is shady, and it’s only going to get crazier,” he says. Today, his engine has a small but devoted following: After growing 50% year over year, it reached 30 million searches a day in 2018, and is poised to grow even faster since Google added DuckDuckGo as a default search-engine option in its latest Chrome browser in more than 60 markets this past March. DuckDuckGo has also introduced a browser extension for Firefox…

Fast internet service is about more than just streaming Netflix shows. Firefighters need it to track rapidly changing conditions and communicate across rugged terrain. During last year’s Mendocino Complex Fire—the biggest wildfire in California history—a Verizon billing glitch caused the wireless giant to throttle the Santa Clara County Fire Department’s “unlimited” 4G access, putting lives on the line. Adam Cosner, a county firefighter, spoke out immediately, using a Reddit AMA to shame Verizon into establishing new wireless plans for first responders, featuring truly unlimited data, no usage caps, and priority access. Cosner also testified before the state legislature last summer to campaign against fire retardants used in products such as electronics, upholstered furniture, and mattresses (“They don’t slow blazes but do release carcinogens,” he says). He collaborated with the California…

When Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico, in 2017, architect Jonathan Marvel, who was born on the island and now works in New York, saw an opportunity to rethink the island’s infrastructure. He cofounded Resilient Power Puerto Rico (RPPR), a nonprofit that has restored electricity to some of the poorest communities by taking advantage of the island’s abundant sun. RPPR built its first “solar hub” a month after the storm, and has since installed more than 30 at community centers. But instead of just donating solar panels and batteries, RPPR helped recruit and train locals to install them, created a tool kit that communities can use to plan and finance new solar hubs themselves, and set up watertreatment systems that run on the solar power. Marvel is now developing plans for…

If you think mastering a new system update is hard, imagine sitting down to a computer for the first time after 20 years in prison. A career in the criminal-justice nonprofit sector inspired Elena Sigman to launch Tech 101, a free course to educate returning citizens in digital basics. Last year, a cohort of 13 students (average sentence length: 16 years) gathered at John Jay College in New York over the course of 10 sessions to learn how to log on to a computer, create email and social media accounts, and use basic programs like Microsoft Word. Instructor Albert Fermin has spent years teaching tech skills inside prisons where, because electronic devices are often not permitted, the education is more theoretical. In Tech 101, the students are in front of…

Like every executive producer, Marsai Martin understands how long it takes to bring a feature film to the screen. She spent nearly one-third of her life doing it. The 14-year-old originator of Universal Pictures’ Little first pitched the idea, with her father, way back when she was 10. “We had zero clue what we were doing, to be honest,” Martin says of their meeting with Kenya Barris, who’d created Martin’s breakout vehicle, ABC’s Blackish. But Barris embraced the idea, which was inspired by the 1988 Tom Hanks classic Big, and looped in producer Will Packer (Girls Trip) to shepherd it to screen. Martin signed on as executive producer, the youngest person ever to earn that title for a major motion picture. Little took in $15.5 million when it debuted in…

China’s “post-’95 generation”—as Miranda Qu, cofounder of the social commerce app Xiaohongshu, calls the country’s young consumers—are digitally native, educated, and openminded. They’re also “a consumption force,” she says, and “they don’t want anything mass market.” On her Instagram-meets-Pinterest platform, now valued at $3 billion, influencers share their lifestyles and stories about the products they use (hard selling is discouraged). Today, more than 220 million users treat it as a product search engine. Qu has added the ability to buy products directly, allowing international brands to operate in China without a local banking relationship or warehouse. Last fall, U.S. makeup brand ColourPop launched on the platform, which does all the importing and product fulfilling for cross-border products. Qu recently let brands create their own pages and debuted a feature connecting…

Jessica Zhang’s role at Lyft is to delight the ride-sharing company’s 30.7 million users—and attract new ones. She does that through collaborations and glitzy events with celebrities like Cardi B and Demi Lovato, while “being careful to make sure we’re developing content that would occur in a car naturally,” she says. Here are three ways the Hollywood social media vet achieved this mission in 2018. ▸ When Atlanta rapper 6lack held a listening party for his album East Atlanta Love Letter at a drive-in theater last September, Zhang capitalized on the opportunity to create a partnership. On the night of the event, select local fans could request a luxury black car in VIP “6lack mode” to escort them to the event. ▸ To celebrate the launches of Cardi B’s Invasion…

Kim Kardashian West, Selena Gomez, Miley Cyrus, and other megawatt stars posted Instagram Stories over the past year that looked like high-end scrapbooks, with photo collages curated against minimalist backgrounds. They were created using templates by Alfonso Cobo, the cofounder of the app Unfold. Cobo launched the app in 2018 with templates—inspired by paper products, indie magazines, and analog photography—designed specifically for Instagram Stories. “It’s all related to our shorter attention spans and desire for real content,” Cobo says. Unfold has 16 million users and is No. 1 in the App Store in seven countries. Cobo expects $8.2 million in revenue in 2019, in part through brand partnerships: Unfold’s branded content studio, launched last November, has created custom templates for Equinox, Tommy Hilfiger, the AIDS nonprofit Product Red, and others.…

One of the most influential voices in the fashion industry belongs to Diet Prada, an Instagram account with 1.3 million followers. Tony Liu and Lindsey Schuyler started it in 2014 as a lighthearted way to call out knockoff designs. In the past year, though, it has become a champion for design integrity and accountability. Liu and Schuyler, who fund the project through branded merchandise and partnerships with select fashion brands, have exposed imitations by designers including Virgil Abloh and Jason Wu, along with Christian Siriano, who apologized and pulled a pair of Valentino-looking dresses in February. Diet Prada is also revealing how fast-fashion brands and influencer-owned labels peddle knockoffs from designers too small to fight back. “Young creatives don’t have the resources to battle in court,” says Liu. The duo’s…

VP OF ENERGY AND CLIMATE PRACTICE, 3DEGREES Erin Craig, of the environmental consultancy 3Degrees, is getting businesses to work together to reduce the effects of climate change. Last year, Craig secured the funding to develop a solar array in Virginia and a wind project in Illinois by wrangling a joint agreement from four corporations—Apple, cloud-services provider Akamai, Etsy, and insurance giant Swiss Re—to finance and purchase energy from these sites. The deal established a model that makes renewable-energy procurement cost-effective for companies both large and small. (Until now, tech titans with large energy loads, like Google, have dominated the growing field.) “Not everybody is a giant energy user. Not everybody has a big bucket of money,” Craig says. Partnerships can bridge the gap. By the end of 2019, the Apple-Akamai-Etsy-Swiss…

“What happens on your iPhone stays on your iPhone.” The message was printed 14 stories high, in simple black and white, on the side of a building at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. The proclamation was quintessential Apple: a bold spectacle, a welltimed verbal play, and a calculated jab at Google, Amazon, and every other competitor about to show off its latest products on the world’s biggest stage. It was also misleading. Apple, after all, practically laid the groundwork for the surveillance economy with its powerful App Store. Through a certain lens, the iPhone is one of the most secure devices in the world. Its contents are encrypted by default. Any data that Apple collects through services such as Maps is assigned to random identifiers (rather than…

Since LVMH acquired a majority stake in the 120-year-old luggage brand in 2017, Rimowa has been collaborating with the likes of Fendi, Supreme, and Off-White to produce limited-edition luxury suitcases. For its latest collaboration, the brand worked with L.A.-based artist Alex Israel, who put the colors of his city’s sunset on two models of its aluminum cases. (From $2,800) Humphry Slocombe Ice Cream (FROM $9.99 A PINT, HUMPHRYSLOCOMBE.COM) “Getting delivery of San Francisco–based Humphry Slocombe ice cream will be the death of me. I’m addicted to their unusual flavors, like ‘Secret Breakfast’ (cornflakes and bourbon).” —Chris Milk, cofounder and CEO, Within NECESSARY VICE Hire Learning The kind of corporate culture U.S. workers want vs. what they have It Never Gets Old “I have a Rawlings outdoor basketball that I bought…

1 Waking Up “AUTUMN LEAVES,” CANNONBALL ADDERLEY I play a full jazz vinyl in the morning for coffee and breakfast. This is the first track off my favorite album. 2 Commuting “THE HARBOR IS YOURS,” AESOP ROCK Aesop Rock is my favorite artist for public transportation. 3 Working Out “CALIFORNIA SOUL” (DIPLO REMIX), MARLENA SHAW/DIPLO You can’t not move to it. 4 Hard at Work “ARUARIAN DANCE,” NUJABES I usually write to Nujabes instrumentals. 5 Mellowing Out “SAN FRANCISCO KNIGHTS,” PEOPLE UNDER THE STAIRS There’s nothing more mellow than this group. 6 In the Zone “BRAZIL,” GEOFF AND MARIA MULDAUR When I was working on Russian Doll, I listened to the Brazil soundtrack by Michael Kamen. This is the title song.…

With nearly everyone involved in remote work to some degree—even if it only involves checking email on a smartphone—the question driving a Fast Company tech and innovation panel discussion in Austin, in March, sponsored by Citrix, the digital workspace specialist, was, “How can tech help keep a disparate workforce productive?” In the old days, a pep talk from the boss could spark productivity. However, according to Citrix Executive Vice President and Chief People Officer Donna Kimmel, employers today have one key task in the digital age: eliminate frustration. “Think about how many times we’re flooded by emails or go to different apps [to receive] notifications,” Kimmel told the panel audience. “We probably spend a quarter of our time hunting for information.” Soon, Citrix employees will arrive at their personalized workspace,…

Alessandro Babini Kristine Belson Carsten Nygaard Brøgger Tim Brooks Lisa Burger Valerie Casey Jimmy Chin Sara Clemens Alfonso Cobo Emily Collins Adam Cosner Erin Craig Kate Crawford Ron Crawford Leah Culver Norman de Greve Neil Dipaola Emily Feistritzer Alexa L. Fogel Nick Foley Jean-François Gagné Eva Galperin Aaron Garbut Isabel Garvey Chris Gibson Menaka Guruswamy Tamer Hassan Mette Hay Rolf Hay Steph Hay Alyssa Henry Davida Herzl Gene Hogg Dev Hynes Lisa Jackson Renee James Kerby Jean-Raymond Arundhati Katju Bom Kim Dan Konopka Damian Kulash Kagiso Lediga Jeff Lehman Kevin Lin Diane Lipscombe Tony Liu Carli Lloyd Peter Lord Chris Lyons Fernando Machado Earl Maize Romitha Mally Marsai Martin Jonathan Marvel Christine McConnell Desmond Meade Sara Menker Seth Meyers Alex Morgan Yannick Nézet-Séguin Tim Nordwind Michaela Olsen Heidi O’Neill Liz…

A few months after Apple reported last year that it was operating on 100% renewable energy—a major milestone for the company—it made a more unusual announcement, especially for a tech giant: It had invested in a 27,000-acre mangrove forest in Colombia. Lisa Jackson, a former head of the Environmental Protection Agency, has spent the past six years helping Apple find effective ways to fight climate change and has determined that “protecting and restoring forests is one of our most important tools in the battle because of their ability to absorb carbon.” The project in Colombia, a partnership with the nonprofit Conservation International, involves protecting mangrove forests, which can store 10 times as much carbon as terrestrial forests. In its first two years, the program is expected to reduce carbon emissions…

FIVE HOURS BEFORE TAPING ON A recent Thursday, the eighth-floor offices at 30 Rockefeller Center are a hive of focused activity. In the bullpenlike space that most of the 16 writers for NBC’s Late Night With Seth Meyers share, jokes about a woman arrested for handing out pot cookies at a St. Patrick’s Day parade (“Police became suspicious when nobody got into a fistfight”) and a “two strike” proposal for sexual harassment on New York City public transportation (“Two?!”) are tapped into iMacs without hair-rending or tears. Down the hall in his corner office, Seth Meyers reads through a segment, making minor adjustments. For followers of latenight TV mythology, accustomed to tales of brutal production schedules and hosts’ hurricanelike mood swings, this all might seem a little tame. “I think…

As the head of Google’s hardware design team, Ivy Ross is consumed by a single question: “When you hold Google in your hands, what does it look and feel like?” In everything from the Daydream VR headset to the Google Home speaker, the former jewelry designer has pioneered the soft, round, often fabric-covered aesthetic that is now recognizable as Google’s own. Last year, Ross’s team launched four products, including the Pixel Slate tablet-laptop, the Google Home Hub assistant with a screen, and the Pixel 3, the most fully realized example of Ross’s vision of approachable, accessible industrial design. This thirdgeneration phone features a two-tone back made of polished and etched glass, modern colors like the coyly named “not pink” (which is definitely a millennialapproved shade), and a pastel-green power button—a…

Florida voters made a landmark decision to restore voting rights to 1.4 million ex-felons via a ballot initiative last November that amended the state’s constitution. Desmond Meade, executive director of the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition and a “returning citizen” himself, led the effort, traversing the state for two years to help collect more than 760,000 signatures for the measure and then advocating for its passage. Meade, who obtained his law degree but is unable to practice because of previous felony convictions, petitioned for the amendment in liberal and conservative counties alike, speaking to anyone he could, even those who claimed to be tough on crime. “Our win showed that you can move major policy issues when you’re able to transcend politics,” he says. “We had about 1 million folks who…

For 60 years, Lego made its signature building blocks from oil-based plastic. In 2018, the company launched its first pieces made from plant-based plastic, sourced from sugarcane. As one of the leaders of Lego’s larger environmental mission, Tim Brooks, the company’s vice president of environmental responsibility, suggested focusing on finding a replacement for polyethylene, a flexible material used in certain Lego pieces, such as dragon wings, because plant-based alternatives were readily available. Coincidentally, the material is used for vegetation shapes like trees and leaves, so the company can now make “plants from plants,” says Brooks. The Vestas Wind Turbine set now features trees made from the substance, and is sold in stores and online for $199. Eighty additional shapes are currently rolling out across collections. Lego is also working on…

The AI revolution has been led by a handful of tech giants—think Amazon, Google, IBM, and Microsoft—but Jean-François Gagné’s Element AI is forging an intrepid path to subvert their dominance. Unlike an Amazon or a Microsoft, startups don’t have ready access to the vast quantities of big data required to train machine-learning algorithms. So Element AI created a clever system for developing algorithms using data the company generates itself through a simulator. “This helps us bootstrap our training process, and then we can fine-tune with the customer’s data and get good performance quickly,” says Gagné, whose clients include the Port of Montreal, in his hometown, which now uses AI to eliminate wait times for truckers arriving to pick up their shipments. In addition, Gagné, whose cofounders include the University of…

In 2017, Starbucks began offering birth mothers in its corporate offices 18 weeks of paid maternity leave and non-birth parents 12 weeks. In January 2018, the company announced it would give all retail workers six weeks of paid leave for a new child, whether they are the birth parent or not. Still, many employees felt overlooked. “Maybe you weren’t about to have a baby, but you have elderly parents. We wanted to provide care in the context of a full family,” says Ron Crawford, the company’s VP of global benefits. Last October, he spearheaded Care@Work, which provides subsidized backup care for children, adults, and the elderly, in partnership with Care.com (“the only company that is set up for adult daycare,” Crawford says). Starbucks provides 10 subsidized backup-care days per year,…

After receiving a $100 million gift last year, Brown University’s Carney Institute for Brain Science did something rare in science and academia: It formalized collaboration. In February 2019, under the guidance of director and neuroscience professor Diane Lipscombe, the institute opened a 10,000-square-foot space that brings together a Justice League of engineers, neuroscientists, data scientists, and others to hasten discoveries around conditions such as autism, epilepsy, and movement disorders. “It’s something of a leap of faith for the faculty to say, ‘We’ll leave our labs and come into this environment,’” Lipscombe says. Scientists are now collaborating on projects like BrainGate, demonstrating how a brain implant can allow people with paralysis to operate regular tablet devices via their thoughts. The renovated building is a hub, “and proximity is never to be…

When Leah Culver started listening to the true-crime drama Serial, it was because everyone was telling her to. (That, and she was training for a marathon.) But when she finished and began sifting through the glut of nearly 660,000 podcasts to find something else, it quickly devolved into “a chore,” says the Dropbox alum. “I wanted to make it more fun.” So she built Breaker, a free, two-year-old podcast app that combines elements from other contentdiscovery platforms to surface ear-gems tailored to a specific user. A Netflix-style home screen greets listeners with a carousel of new episodes in their subscribed-to series, as well as options like “Continue listening” and “Under 20 minutes.” There’s also a Spotify-like playlist function that allows users to sort and reorder new episodes in just a…

Numerous diseases afflict billions but lack good treatments because they are not profitable enough for drugmakers. Cholera, malaria, dengue, and Zika all fall under the “neglected disease” heading, as does river blindness, a parasitic infection. Mark Sullivan, a veteran of GSK and Gilead, knew there were promising leads languishing in academic labs. He decided to “adopt” some of them, convening a virtual team to design and manage every part of the development and approval process—and paying for it in a revolutionary way. Here’s how it worked: Sullivan’s not-for-profit, Medicines Development for Global Health, acquired the license to develop the drug moxidectin in 2014 for human indications, including river blindness, a condition covered by the FDA’s Tropical Disease Priority Review program. That entitled the organization to a priority review for moxidectin—plus…

Mighty Oak uses cut paper, custom puppets, and elaborate miniature sets to make stop-motion and 2-D-animated commercials that engage audiences jaded by run-of-the-mill computer graphics. “Our approach connects back to childhood,” says CEO Jess Peterson, who has a background in branding and communications; her cofounders studied animation at Rhode Island School of Design. Last year, the fouryear-old company booked more than $1 million in client work, including spots for Delta Dental (featuring tooth puppets demonstrating the importance of regular checkups), a stopmotion segment about gender-fluid dating for the pilot of HBO’s comedy Random Acts of Flyness, and a series of playful hosteducation videos for Airbnb Plus. This year, in addition to debuting a short film at Sundance, the trio has produced an appropriately DIY-feeling ad for Etsy, touting the company’s…

There were many moments during NASA’s two-decade-long mission to study Saturn and its moons, carried out by the Cassini spacecraft, when cosmic rays, design flaws, and other unexpected hurdles called for on-thefly problem-solving from program manager Earl Maize. But none required more ingenuity than the live, interactive broadcast of the spacecraft’s “Grand Finale”—a fivemonth-long, 22-orbit sojourn between Saturn and its rings that culminated in a (purposefully) destructive dive into the planet’s atmosphere on September 15, 2017. To capture those last weeks of Cassini’s life, Maize had to manage the spacecraft’s dwindling fuel while transforming Cassini into a real-time broadcasting device—from a distance of roughly 930 million miles. “When [your device] is burning up in Saturn’s atmosphere, there’s not much opportunity to retrieve the footage,” he says. The payoff was worth…

Peter Lord and David Sproxton have spent 40 years fashioning quirky and indelible Claymation characters such as Wallace and Gromit and Shaun the Sheep, reaping more than $1 billion in boxoffice revenues along the way. They’ve also nurtured a creative workshop culture at their animation studio in Bristol, England, and, nearing retirement age, the duo focused on how best to preserve it. Instead of selling to a conglomerate, Lord and Sproxton enabled their 140 employees to acquire 75% of the company last year and have input into running it via a council. “If people are more involved, they’ll work harder and be more committed,” says Sproxton. The new structure ensures Aardman’s artistic and financial independence as it extends its film, commercial, and merchandising businesses, and enters such realms as VR…

After a camping trip left Carsten Nygaard Brøgger frustrated with the poor design of ubiquitous disposable aluminum grills—which not only burn food (and people) easily but can take 200 years to biodegrade—he and his wife, Susanne Nygaard Brøgger, set out to engineer a single-use grill from cardboard and other sustainable materials. “Everyone we talked to said, ‘You’re crazy, that’s not possible,’” says Brøgger. But in July 2017, after years of prototyping at their kitchen table, they unveiled the CasusGrill, an $8 single-use device that runs on bamboo charcoal briquettes. The grill’s cardboard body is insulated from the fifire by a lining of lava stone, the only element that isn’t biodegradable (instead, it can be used in gardens). The grill, small enough to fifit in most backpacks, won a Danish Design…

When Rockstar Games released its Western epic video game Red Dead Redemption 2, in October 2018, it was the biggest entertainment launch in history, generating $725 million in revenue in its first three days. Behind the game’s debut was a team of 2,000 developers and artists, who worked for more than seven years to create its hyperimmersive American Southwest landscape. “My goal is to create a real place—or as close as we can get to one,” says art director Aaron Garbut, who led the worldbuilding team. While the creative process for most games involves writing a script and then creating the setting, Garbut focused on building the world first: swaths of undifferentiated forests and rough boxes for buildings. Slowly, a rectangle would become a house, as the story team thought…

Most athletic wearables focus on heart rate, which can be helpful but conveys nothing about how your muscles are performing or how to adapt your workout. “You have more information about your phone, your computer, and your car than you do about your body, which is a billion times more important,” says Alessandro Babini, the cofounder and CEO of Humon, which makes the Hex, a wearable muscle-oxygen sensor that’s helping elite athletes achieve performance breakthroughs and work out more safely and effectively. The $295 device has consistently sold out since it launched in February 2018, sales increased 30% month over month in 2018, and NFL and NBA teams have used it to gauge how warmed up athletes are before practices and games. Here’s how it works: 1/Red vs. Blue Blood…

As marijuana becomes increasingly legal worldwide—it’s now medically approved in 35 countries—the Praguebased International Cannabis and Cannabinoids Institute (ICCI), which Steph Sherer cofounded in 2015, is ensuring that medical cannabis products are effective, safe, and consistent. “People are making claims without going through a scientific process,” Sherer says. “They’re taking general clinical trial data and linking it to what they’re selling.” The organization has three focal areas: government relations (working with countries, the UN, and the WHO to help them regulate medical cannabis), biomedical services (developing and running clinical trials and quality tests), and plant science (helping growers genetically monitor, analyze, and refine their crops). ICCI is currently working with more than 250 companies in biotech, agriculture, nutrition, and more to test and develop products. Last year, ICCI developed six…

Almost a third of a nurse’s average day “is spent on non-patient care: fetching, gathering, even taking out the trash,” says Andrea Thomaz, who, after a career spent running robotics labs at the Georgia Institute of Technology and the University of Texas, cofounded Diligent Robotics to bring her humanrobot interaction research to market. In September 2018, her company launched a fivehospital beta trial of Moxi, a hospital robot assistant that completes non-patient-facing tasks such as gathering and delivering supplies and lab samples. Thomaz is also honing the robot’s social intelligence to help it better interact with humans. Moxi can read and provide social cues, such as turning its “head”—an LED screen that runs simple face animations such as blinking its eyes—to indicate where it’s headed. Beta trials have helped Thomaz…

Investment banker Romitha Mally has helped orchestrate some of the highestprofile mergers between beloved indie brands and huge conglomerates. In recent years, she brokered Unilever’s acquisitions of Dollar Shave Club (reportedly a $1 billion deal), Sundial Brands (parent of SheaMoisture), and the Laundress, which makes eco-friendly cleaning products. “I try to tell a story,” she says. To woo buyers, she explains how cult brands can power long-term sustainable growth by serving emerging and millennial consumers. “I want both sides to feel like it’s the perfect … fit.” As a result, the founders of Sundial Brands, Dollar Shave Club, and the Laundress continue to run their brands inside Unilever. Mally harnessed the power of the origin story a few years ago when trying to persuade dog-food maker Blue Buffalo to let…

The Problem: The three most convenient food options for travelers in the United States, according to restaurant-trade publication QSR, are Starbucks, Subway, and McDonald’s, presenting many travelers with no choice other than fast food or a bag of Doritos from a vending machine. The Epiphany: Seven years ago, while driving nearly 1,000 miles per week as a Michigan-based salesman, Luke Saunders found himself craving something fresh, like a salad. “I knew I was going to try and fix this problem,” he says. The Execution: Saunders founded Farmer’s Fridge in 2013. His first computerized kiosk debuted that year at a Chicago food court with fresh salads layered in clear plastic jars, assembled each morning in a nearby warehouse. Users could return their plastic containers for reuse, and unsold food was donated…

Last December, Fernando Machado made sure that the best place to buy a Whopper … was at McDonald’s. To launch Burger King’s app-based ordering and payment, Machado and his team created “Whopper Detour,” which geofenced a 600-foot perimeter around 14,000 McDonald’s locations nationwide and triggered a coupon notification on app users’ phones for a 1¢ Whopper and directions to the nearest Burger King. The campaign—part of a years-long effort that has established Burger King as perhaps the most irreverent marketer among fastfeeders—scored 3 billion media impressions and 1.5 million downloads of the app, which earned it the No. 1 slot in the App Store. “We’re not the largest brand in the market, so anything we do needs to count,” says Machado, who joined Burger King in 2014 after 18 years…

Veterans have skills that can translate well to leading a classroom. Having conducted multiple studies of a Defense Department–funded program called Troops to Teachers that was congressionally enacted in 1993, longtime education researcher Emily Feistritzer says she “knew a good bit about the potential of that market.” Teach-Now, her six-year-old online teacher-education platform, partnered with the Veterans Administration two years ago, and today the Department of Veteran Affairs is covering the $6,000 tuition cost for the 60 veterans enrolled in Teach-Now’s ninemonth teaching certification program. Feistritzer, 77, who began her career as a Catholic nun teaching high school science and math while still in her teens (she left the convent in 1972), founded Teach-Now to prepare educators for digitally native kids. The program’s collaborative virtual courses culminate in a teacher’s…

Sheela Søgaard has transformed the Bjarke Ingels Group over the past 11 years from a 45-person shop in Copenhagen, Denmark, that was short on cash to a 550-person international megafirm by implementing a rigorous vetting system for each effort, no matter how small. “It comes down to: What does it cost to deliver projects?” she says. Her vigilance has enabled BIG’s architects to take on these recent bold, experimental projects. Copenhill: The firm constructed the world’s only ski slope atop a garbage incinerator (Denmark’s Amager Bakke waste-to-energy plant), which opened in 2019. Google’s expanded headquarters: BIG is working with British designer Thomas Heatherwick to create a fourbuilding complex in Mountain View, California, as well as a massive “landscaper” London headquarters at King’s Cross. Virgin Hyperloop One: This high-speed transit system…

As sea levels rise, Bangkok is simultaneously sinking, making the flat, paved-over megacity vulnerable to flooding when it rains. Instead of building infrastructure to keep stormwater out, local architect Kotchakorn Voraakhom designs parks to capture it. “Getting rid of water is an impossible approach, because we’re a city of water,” she says. The wedgeshaped Chulalongkorn Centennial Park, in central Bangkok, for example, which opened in 2017, can hold 1 million gallons of water. An on-site museum with a sloping green roof directs water through wetlands and into a retention pond at the lowest part of the grounds, which helps prevent nearby blocks from flooding. Another park that Voraakhom designed, which will open this summer on a university campus on the northern edge of the city, features a massive green roof…

PLAYWRIGHT, ACTOR Theater vet Heidi Schreck’s play What the Constitution Means to Me was inspired by her experience as a 15-year-old giving speeches for scholarship money at American Legion halls across the country about the importance of the U.S. Constitution. She portrays both her current and teenage self on stage, reflecting on how her family’s history intersects with American history—and focusing specifically on the Constitution’s lack of protection for women and minorities. After successful runs in San Francisco and off-Broadway in New York, the play opened in March at Broadway’s Helen Hayes Theater. “I’m talking about things that are 230 years old, and everything we touch on is shockingly relevant,” she says. A scene at the end of the play depicts Schreck’s character debating a high school student about whether…