Indholdsfortegnelse for September 2022 i Fast Company

Why Not Both? Every year, there seems to be another study that comes out showing that young Americans would rather be YouTube stars than anything else, including astronauts. But, as the internet meme goes, why not both? Mark Rober, a mechanical engineer and a former NASA employee who worked on the Mars Curiosity project, has amassed 22 million YouTube followers for his clever and engaging science projects, exploding that false binary. Rober “is demonstrating on a consistent basis, through various media, how to connect with young people and inspire them not just to learn, but act,” editorial director Jill Bernstein wrote in her initial pitch for what became this issue’s exuberant, must-read profile of him (page 64), also citing his recent crowdfunding drives for environmental causes that each raised tens…

BEST WORKPLACES FOR INNOVATORS In the mid-1990s, toy company Spin Master introduced a line of planes called Air Hogs. The toys were simple to use and safe, powered by compressed air rather than the tiny combustion engines found on conventional (as well as more expensive and complicated) RC model planes. Air Hogs were an instant success, and the company continues to introduce hot sellers nearly 30 years later. “We spend a lot of time observing how kids and their families play,” says Max Rangel, global president and CEO of Spin Master. “We love when people tell us, ‘You think like a six-year-old.’ We work hard to build the intuition to know what will mesmerize and delight a child.” Spin Master has applied its creative approach to invent and develop engaging…

Cathy Hackl, chief metaverse officer and cofounder, Journey Instagram @DONALLENIII He’s a creator who combines AR, AI, and VFX to design mind-bending videos. He’s building a metaverse that is full of inspiration and fun. Twitter @DILMERVALECILLOS He teaches folks how to advance in AR and VR and is very focused on educating the next generation of metaverse developers. TikTok @HERFIRST100K She’s encouraging women’s financial literacy and how to be boss ladies! I have learned so much from her. Social Game ROBLOX I play the Roblox game Adopt Me with my kids, and we used to play Fashion Famous. I’ve also taken them on tours of Nikeland and Gucci Town. Website THEFABRICANT.STUDIO You launch virtual fashion collections with this digital studio. I was part of their Season 0 studio cohort. The…

Most Innovative Companies Every year, data storage company Western Digital holds an innovation bazaar, bringing employees together to brainstorm ideas for the next big thing in data infrastructure. Last year, the event had a twist: Employees participated in a custom-designed role-playing video game. Each employee chose an avatar, then wandered around a pixelated world on their own unique innovation adventure, holding conversations about creativity with digital versions of their coworkers. The concept was a nod to recent advancements Western Digital products had enabled in gaming culture and proof of the power of data storage to drive creativity and foster innovation. “We believe in unlocking possibilities through digital transformation,” says Joel Davis, vice president, creative and content, global corporate marketing at Western Digital. The company’s pursuit of this goal during the…

BEST WORKPLACES FOR INNOVATORS Caregivers are a talented and selfless segment of the workforce. Many such individuals—a good number of them professionals—found themselves having to put their careers on hold as they dealt with the challenges of providing care during a pandemic. (Working moms, for example, represented a large portion of the 1.1 million women who exited the workplace in the year leading up to February 2022.) And they are now finding it difficult to re-enter the workforce. Audible—the Newark, NJ-based audio storytelling company—wants to rewrite the narrative for this sector with its “Next Chapter” Returnship Program, which offers 16-to 20-week paid internships to professionals with recent gaps in their employment history. Of those who have successfully completed the program, more than 80% have received full-time job offers from Audible.…

BEST WORKPLACES FOR INNOVATORS Building a data center is a complex endeavor—any failure can have huge consequences on what are typically multimillion-dollar projects. So, with miles of electrical cable snaking through the jobsite, how can contractors make sure that every single connection is made correctly? That used to involve an inspector manually inspecting each fastener. Milwaukee Tool recently came up with a better way: a digital torque wrench that attaches the fastener, records the event, and automatically reports the outcome to the builder, owner, and insurer. This torque wrench is just one of many forward-leaning tools developed by Milwaukee with the ultimate goal of helping tradespeople do the job right. “When people think about power tool companies, everybody thinks about their grandfather’s circular saw or a corded drill. But that’s…

BEST WORKPLACES FOR INNOVATORS Small business owners spent much of the last two years trying to move forward as the ground shifted beneath their feet. From extended closures and supply chain issues to labor shortages and changing health regulations, the far-reaching effects of COVID-19 brought one unprecedented challenge after another. Early in the pandemic, the global B2B marketing team at American Express recognized this turbulent new landscape and responded by creating an education platform called Business Class. The platform quickly grew into a widely used source of information and support. It’s a big reason why American Express earned a spot on Fast Company’s 2022 list of Best Workplaces for Innovators. A NEW LEARNING PLATFORM “When the financial crisis happened, our small businesses needed customers, so we created Small Business Saturday…

• U.S. ALEX LEE, HICKORY, NC • INTERNATIONAL ITAÚ UNIBANCO, SÃO PAULO • ENTERPRISE DEMANDBASE, SAN FRANCISCO • CONSUMER PRODUCTS ELECTRONIC ARTS, REDWOOD CITY, CA • SMALL COMPANIES BBVA AI FACTORY SL, MADRID • MIDSIZE COMPANIES MAVEN CLINIC, NEW YORK • LARGE COMPANIES DBS BANK, SINGAPORE • NONPROFITS JUNIOR ACHIEVEMENT WORLDWIDE, BOSTON • FOR SUSTAINABILITY KOHLER, KOHLER, WI • FOR DIVERSE EMPLOYEES MICROSOFT, BELLEVUE, WA • FOR WOMEN ADOBE, SAN JOSE • FOR EARLY-CAREER WORKERS AES, ARLINGTON, VA…

FOR MARKETING LIKE A JEDI WHEN ASAD AYAZ started at Disney in 2005, the company had made exactly zero Marvel movies or Star Wars streaming series. Now Ayaz, who runs marketing for all original productions, has a heroic task ahead. He has to manage an unprecedented number of releases as the company spends $33 billion on content in its 2022 fiscal year. He also has to create campaigns and custom content for each release that explain its place in these expanded universes while giving every story its own spotlight—all while getting people excited. Ayaz was responsible for the debuts of two new Star Wars series in the past year (The Book of Boba Fett and Obi-Wan Kenobi) and six Marvel ones (Loki, The Falcon & the Winter Soldier, WandaVision, Moon…

FOR UPGRADING THE CONVENIENCE STORE PICTURE A CONVENIENCE STORE. Now, instead of a dingy chain with fluorescent lighting, imagine suspended greenery, black stools near polished wood tables, and a curated array of high-quality products with a local connection or a social impact component, from Balkan Bites phyllo pies to Atelier Saucier burlap napkin sets. This is what Mike LaVitola has created with Foxtrot market. Inspired by the “high-low mix” of the legendary Parisian fashion warehouse Colette and Japanese konbini where “the food is great, and they aren’t viewed as a place of last resort,” he says, LaVitola opened his first Foxtrot store in 2015 in Chicago. He expanded to Dallas in 2019, Washington, D.C., last year, and now oversees 21 stores. In January, LaVitola raised $100 million—with Austin, Miami, Houston, and…

FOR TURNING L.A. COUNTY’S PARKS INTO TOOLS FOR PANDEMIC RESPONSE AND RACIAL EQUITY WHEN NORMA EDITH GARCÍA-Gonzalez took the helm of the Los Angeles County Parks department during the first summer of the pandemic, the parks were jammed. Soon, in the lowincome neighborhoods that make up much of unincorporated L.A. County, people were using parks as a shelter of last resort. García-Gonzalez turned the department into a front line of pandemic response, hosting COVID-testing sites and vaccination centers, and providing food and shelter. “It reinvigorated and redefined our sense of being community nurturers,” she says. In the months since, the department has rethought what its 180 parks can offer the unincorporated communities of the nation’s largest county. They have continued to serve as ad hoc shelters, housing people in gyms…

FOR PLACING SENIOR CITIZENS AT THE CENTER OF THEIR URBAN COMMUNITIES A NEW DANIEL LIBESKIND-designed apartment building is set to open in New York’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood in 2023. The angular, 11-story building will have 190 units, indoor gardens, and a stunning courtyard atrium. But these starchitect-designed residences won’t be available to just anyone. They’re being developed in partnership with Selfhelp Realty Group, a Manhattan-based nonprofit that specializes in affordable housing for seniors. Called the Atrium at Sumner, the $132 million project received financing from the New York City Housing Authority: 57 of its apartments will be earmarked for homeless senior citizens; the rest are reserved for senior households making less than 60% of the area median income. “Our motivation [is to keep] people living in dignity and independently in their…

FOR USING THE LEGAL SYSTEM TO THWART THE BIGGEST CYBERATTACKS TOM BURT LEADS A division of Microsoft that protects customers from cyberattacks. That means securing their data not just from thieves and fraudsters, but hackers backed by powerful governments, including the Russia-linked groups that launched cyber attacks in Ukraine this past spring. Engineering is a big part of those efforts. But Burt, the former head of Microsoft’s litigation unit, is a lawyer, not a coder. He helped thwart the Ukrainian attacks by appealing to the U.S. court system to seize and take down seven internet domain names used to command and control malware, deploying a legal process that his team has honed against Russian hackers since 2016. Burt’s work often requires diplomacy. His team coordinated with U.S. and Ukrainian governments…

FOR MEETING CUSTOMERS WHERE THEY LIVE WHEN WHITNEY Pegden set out to persuade Walmart customers to trust the company to deliver groceries directly to their fridges, freezers, and pantries, she imagined that technology would be the answer. She and her team at InHome, developed through Walmart’s Store No. 8 incubator, outfitted their delivery staff in 2019 with wearable cameras in order to provide customers with a live video feed. They also installed smart locks at garage entrances and front doors so workers had access. But the secret to success, she realized, was the people. Even when Pegden’s team was forced to introduce a COVID-safe doorstep-delivery option, customers enjoyed seeing the same two or three friendly faces at their homes, week in and week out. Pegden began to focus more on…

FOR SHORTENING THE SEARCH FROM THE START, GOOGLE HAS FEATURED an “I’m Feeling Lucky” button, which transports a searcher directly to the first result. That spirit of providing the best information with the least amount of effort lives on. Liz Reid, a 19-year Google veteran, is charged with turning research into new features. Last year, Google unveiled a new machine-learning technology that Reid says is 1,000 times better at comprehending language than its already potent predecessor. For example, it understands more than 350 concepts relating to the term “acrylic painting,” helping guide searchers to everything from brush techniques to cleanup advice. Reid says these research breakthroughs are enabling new features that wouldn’t have occurred to Google’s search team in the past. A “multisearch” feature lets users combine images (e.g., a…

FOR SHIFTING THE POWER AT AMAZON CHRISTIAN SMALLS WAS JUST trying to do the right thing when, in March 2020, he led a walkout at a Staten Island Amazon warehouse in a protest against COVID safety conditions. Two years later, he had created the first-ever union of Amazon employees, discussed labor organizing in the Oval Office with President Biden, testified at a Senate hearing about Amazon’s labor law violations, and emerged as a force impelling the labor movement forward. Terminated after the walkout, he raised money to start a worker-led union, spent days at the bus stop outside the fulfillment center to catch employees during shift changes, and held barbecues, bonfires, and music events to build relationships with them. Crucially, he didn’t turn to an established labor group for funding…

FOR POINTING THE CAMERA AT SOCIAL MEDIA STARDOM THERE HAVE BEEN several documentaries about YouTube, but only one from a filmmaker who was once one of the global video platform’s brightest stars. “My ambition was to tell that story from the inside,” says Casey Neistat, who became a star creator after he began posting videos in 2010 that showed off new tech and travel experiences. Today, his channel has 12 million followers and a cumulative 3 billion views. Neistat’s Under the Influence, which debuted at SXSW in March, follows David Dobrik as he becomes one of YouTube’s most bankable stars—and sticks with the story as Dobrik’s fairy-tale rise is halted in 2021 when it emerges that Dobrik had a role both in enabling an alleged sexual assault by a member…

FOR MINTING MORE BLACK DOCTORS XAVIER UNIVERSITY, the only historically Black, Catholic university, has sent more African American students and students of color on to earn medical degrees and PhDs in the health sciences than any other higher education institution in the country. Soon, the school will be able to produce Black MDs of its own, with a new medical school announced by president Reynold Verret in April. The plan is a logical extension of programs that Verret-a Haitian-born, Brooklyn-raised biochemist and immunologist—has championed since becoming Xavier’s president in 2016: new preprofessional programs in public health, speech pathology, pharmaceutical studies, and health analytics. In 2020, in partnership with Louisiana hospital network Ochsner Health, Xavier launched the first physician’s assistant program at an HBCU and in March 2021 announced two new…

FOR BLOWING THE LID OFF ORGANIZED CRIME ON SOCIAL MEDIA IT BEGAN WITH IVORY. GRETCHEN Peters, a former investigative journalist, was frustrated by Facebook’s unwillingness to combat illegal wildlife trading, which was happening in plain sight across its platform. She and other online crime researchers tried an unusual legal strategy: In 2017, they filed a confidential complaint with the Securities and Exchange Commission, arguing that Facebook was violating federal law by profiting from the wildlife trade and not disclosing the extent of this criminal activity to investors. (Peters has since coordinated the filing of six additional chapters to the complaint. Facebook didn’t reply to requests for comment, but the company has pointed out that it warns investors about illicit content in its filings.) The complaint didn’t force Facebook to fix…

FOR OPEN SOURCING A COVID 19 VACCINE FOR THE REST OF THE WORLD AS AN INOCULATION, THERE’S NOTHING REVOLUTIONary about Corbevax, the groundbreaking COVID-19 vaccine developed by Maria Elena Bottazzi and Peter Hotez, infectious disease experts at Baylor College of Medicine. That’s the point. “The most widely produced vaccine in developing countries is the recombinant protein hepatitis B vaccine, made through microbial fermentation in yeast,” Hotez says. For Corbevax, he and Bottazzi leveraged that technology—which they were using for a SARS vaccine—changing the target virus to SARS-CoV-2. They raised money from foundations, individuals, and companies like vodka maker Tito’s, which donated $1 million in 2020 and renewed its commitment this year. Corbevax is low-cost, vegan (important for Muslims), and requires only simple refrigeration. Most remarkably, it’s the first opensource vaccine…

Employee morale isn’t great these days. Job satisfaction is low. Burnout rates are high. Workers are feeling overwhelmed and undervalued. But if you look closely, it’s not the lowest-ranking employees reporting the greatest levels of stress and anxiety. Nor is it the leaders tasked with running companies during an unprecedented period of workplace transformation. It’s the poor souls stuck in the middle. These middle managers—the butt of the joke in so many office comedies for their outsize ambition, assumed mediocrity, or embrace of the status quo—actually play a crucial role in most workplaces. They get stuff done. They motivate others to get stuff done. They provide the vital link between the C-suite and the rest of the company—two groups that often have vastly different desires and motivations. Serving as this…

Business owners who have tapped former service members to fill technology jobs often share a common opinion: Veterans are valuable additions because they bring with them the unique and important skills required to be successful in the workplace of tomorrow. Veterans are leaders who have high integrity, which makes them well-rounded and outstanding candidates. Those qualities can be applied to more than just tech jobs. “Veterans bring a powerful skillset and real-world experience to many positions,” says Jason Frei, senior director, program management, Boeing Global Services and president of the Boeing Veteran Engagement Team Business Resource Group. “They are resilient, mission-oriented, and forward-thinking. Veterans tend to have agile and entrepreneurial mindsets and are great at working on teams.” “Veterans usually run toward problems instead of away from them,” says Michael…

Most Innovative Companies While the old perception of a pharmacist may be a Norman Rockwell-like apothecary hunched behind a counter filling pill bottles, Walgreens believes its team of health professionals have the potential to do much more. The pharmacy giant is undertaking efforts to improve access to care across its network of nearly 9,000 stores. “The goal is to think about pharmacy and clinical services across the entire continuum of a consumer’s and patient’s clinical care, whether it’s acute illnesses, primary care, post acute, hospital readmissions, and end of life,” says Anita Allemand, chief transformation and integration officer of Walgreens parent company, Walgreens Boots Alliance. “And, in the process, it is elevating the role of pharmacists.” It’s these bold initiatives to transform its company and spark a shift in how…

What’s your best habit, and what’s your worst one? My best is taking care of my health, working out, and doing my best to maintain a healthy lifestyle. My worst is letting myself succumb to too much caffeine. What is your biggest indulgence? Oat milk coffee. What advice would you give your younger self? Stop trying to fit in with the cool people and just focus on doing the things you love. What do you do when you’re creatively stuck? I call my friends for inspiration and go back and forth [with them] on ideas. Is there a businessperson you admire? MrBeast. He has an insane work ethic and is always pushing boundaries in content creation. Is there a buzzword you never want to hear again? “White knight” or “Simp.”…

BEST WORKPLACES FOR INNOVATORS St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, in Memphis, TN, has long been admired for providing free medical care to children battling cancer and other life-threatening diseases. To help find new ways to fund its mission, the nonprofit organization has turned to employee-driven innovation: Staff members at ALSAC, the fundraising and awareness organization for St. Jude, are encouraged to spend 20% of their work time pursuing organization-improvement projects. One such project, conceived by a web software engineer, led to the development of a payment platform that accepts cryptocurrency donations. In just six months, the crypto program—created for a growing pool of (mostly young) philanthropists who regularly use digital currencies—took in $1 million in contributions from more than 100,000 donors. For St. Jude, which has during the past 60…

Jayna Kothary • TITLE: GLOBAL CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER, MRM • EDUCATION: BS, ASTON BUSINESS SCHOOL, BIRMINGHAM, ENGLAND • FIRST JOB: MANAGEMENT CONSULTANT, KPMG • PREVIOUS JOB: CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER, WPP The first woman to serve as global chief technology officer at marketing agency MRM, Jayna Kothary opened the company’s innovation hub, Lab13, to make its tools accessible to all employees and launched a new innovation-as-a-service offering that allows clients to access MRM’s multidisciplinary expertise on a subscription basis, leading to new work with such brands as Nestlé, Coca-Cola, and Amazon.…

BEST WORKPLACES FOR INNOVATORS Employees at Alex Lee, Inc.—the multibillion-dollar parent company to Merchants Distributors, Lowes Foods, W. Lee Flowers, and Souto Foods—who show potential for internal advancement are placed in five-person teams to develop potential business ventures. They ultimately face off for funding in a competition—clearly inspired by the popular TV show Shark Tank—called “Spark Tank,” in which the winners are awarded seed funding to further explore their ideas. The competition is part of the North Carolina-based company’s one-year executive leadership development program. And the results have been lucrative: Employees have been empowered to innovate, and their winning ideas have collectively generated millions in additional revenue streams. It’s just one example of employee creativity—the result of efforts to ignite creativity at all levels of the company—that puts Alex Lee…

BEST WORKPLACES FOR INNOVATORS In 2009, Singapore-based DBS Bank was, well, struggling. “People joked that DBS stood for ‘damn bloody slow,’” says Bidyut Dumra, executive director and group head of innovation at DBS. “We were regrettably notorious for our lack of customer centricity and customer-friendly products.” DBS leadership set an ambitious decade-long turnaround plan. Starting in 2009, it devoted itself to transforming into the “Asian Bank of Choice.” Towards the end of 2013, as a response to the rise of fintechs, DBS added digitalization to its Asian strategy. This evolved the following year to a new vision of becoming the “Best Bank in the World.” DBS radically rethought its processes and service standards, aiming to deliver a top-tier user experience. The bank upgraded its back-end technology, pouring resources into talent,…

FOR EXPOSING THE MYTH OF WORK LIFE BALANCE THE TELEVISION SERIES SEVERANCE, WHICH DEBUTED on Apple TV Plus in February to glowing reviews, came out at an interesting time: Millions of homebound workers were considering a return to office life and contemplating just how enmeshed their personal and professional selves had become over the past couple years. The show follows employees of a mysterious corporation who wear microchips that make them forget everything outside the office the moment they enter it. To convey this dystopia, cinematographer Jessica Lee Gagné found inspiration in the work of photographer Lars Tunbjörk, whose deadpan images of office life are marked by ultrasaturated color and biting humor. Filming in a New Jersey office building that once housed the legendary Bell Labs, Gagné used stark lighting…

FOR TURNING REAL LOCATIONS INTO METAVERSES THE WORD METAVERSE SEEMS to be on everybody’s lips, but Timoni West is actually living there, demonstrating how immersive computing environments can transform our real ones. West’s job at Unity, the $10 billion market cap software company that builds tools to create digital worlds, is to envision the spatial computing experiences that developers will want to build in the future and make sure that Unity’s 3D rendering engine offers the tools and content to create them. Increasingly, the next big opportunity, West observes, is in the $3.2 billion market for “digital twins,” or real-time simulations of real-world things such as factories, industrial machines, or airports. What makes these simulations different from the fictional worlds of games is real-time data. “You have to be able…

FOR LAPPING THE COMPETITION DELL XPS LAPTOPS ARE WIDELY REGARDED as the Windows world’s best portable computers. “We design XPS for tomorrow,” says Donnie Oliphant, who has spent 34 years at Dell and is senior director for the XPS line. Some of his team’s seemingly daring moves-such as squeezing a 13-inch display into a notebook the size of a typical 11-incher-have become industrywide trends. (In 2021, even Apple followed XPS by putting bigger screens in smaller MacBook Pros.) Dell reported a record 2021 for PC sales, $61.5 billion, and its best-ever profits, too, of $4.4 billion. The new XPS 13 Plus, released in April, was designed to please 16-to-30-year-olds who prize efficiency over feature overload; its keyboard fits roomier keys in the same amount of space, ditches the conventional trackpad…

FOR LENDING AN EMPATHETIC EAR WHILE MASTERING Mdou Moctar’s acclaimed 2021 album, Afrique Victime, audio engineer Heba Kadry had a top priority: to ensure that the sound would translate on tinny cellphone speakers because that’s how most people in Moctar’s native Niger listen to music. It wasn’t an impossible task—making sure the music had presence in the midrange, while not sounding too harsh—but it was an excitingly unconventional one that spoke to Kadry’s philosophy. “Music is about how we connect to each other,” she says. The Egyptian-born audio engineer was responsible for six of Pitchfork’s top 50 albums of 2021, including Japanese Breakfast’s Jubilee. In 2022, she worked with Cate Le Bon and Animal Collective and mastered the soundtrack for the film The Northman.…

FOR GIVING HOT DOGS A HIGHER PURPOSE “THE HOT DOG IS sort of an ambassador for the company,” says Gina Asoudegan, who for 16 years has helped New Jersey–based Applegate fulfill its mission of “changing the meat we eat.” While they aren’t Applegate’s top-selling item—chicken nuggets are—hot dogs have become a showcase for innovation at the company, which sells humanely raised, non-GMO, antibioticfree deli meats, sausages, burgers, bacon, and cheese in more than 22,600 stores nationwide (the company was bought by Hormel Foods in 2015 for around $775 million). When it landed on grocery shelves last November, the Do Good Dog became the first nationally distributed hot dog “made with beef raised on verified regenerative U.S. grasslands,” the culmination of a yearslong effort by Asoudegan to demonstrate that a company…

FOR PROTECTING WORKERS WHO SPEAK OUT AFTER IFEOMA OZOMA WENT public with her allegations of racial discrimination against Pinterest in 2020, she became a prominent advocate for reforming the tech industry by empowering employees to speak out without repercussions. She and fellow whistleblower Aerica Shimizu Banks helped draft and sponsor California’s Silenced No More Act, which passed last year and bars the use of confidentiality agreements for workers who experience harassment or discrimination; Washington state has enacted similar legislation. Ozoma and others have also used shareholder proposals to pressure companies into revising their employment agreements. Meanwhile, her consulting practice, Earthseed, pitches companies on the business case for enabling employees to hold them accountable. “Now that companies are being forced to operate under a patchwork of state laws [including Silenced No…

FOR GIVING THE SHIPPING INDUSTRY A NEEDED JOLT AS A CARGO SHIP WAITS OUTSIDE A PORT, IT can burn as much as 12 metric tons of fuel a day—emitting more than 38 tons of CO2, plus air pollution. Late last year, as the supply chain crisis pushed port traffic to extremes, dozens of ships waited offshore for weeks outside the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. At Denmarkbased Maersk, Sebastian Klasterer Toft and David Samad spun out a new venture in January from the company’s offshore service division called Still-strom to develop a new solution: buoys that let ships plug into electricity while offshore instead of burning fuel oil. Toft and Samad secured funding from Maersk and grants from the Danish Maritime Fund and Danish Energy Agency; now they’re…

FOR MAKING ELECTRIC BOATS FLY BOATS AREN’T EASY TO ELECTRIFY. LITHIUM-ION BATTERIES OFfer 100 times less energy density than gasoline, making it hard for boats to overcome drag from the water, not to mention the extra weight of battery cells themselves. “I was driven by the pure challenge of it,” says Gustav Hasselskog, a mechanical engineer who found a solution in tech that’s been around since the 1890s: hydrofoils. Modern hydrofoils are fins installed under a boat’s hull that make it look like it’s hovering above the surface. Because the boat is essentially flying, it requires less energy. Hasselskog led the dynamic modeling for Swedish company Candela’s 100% electric C-8, the second commercially available electric hydrofoil boat on the market besides Candela’s C-7. He also devised the flight-control software that…

FOR KNOWING WHERE GEN Z LIVES SOON AFTER JENA Rose, a 21-year-old singer from Texas, debuted her first single, “Checkmate,” last summer, her largely teen fans launched a campaign to get her more airtime. They held nationwide Zoom parties during which they used social media to request the song on local stations and syndicated shows with Rose popping into the virtual gatherings to cheer them on. By March, “Checkmate” had cracked Mediabase’s Top 40 chart of North America’s most-played radio songs; it also notched 9 million YouTube views and appeared in some 33,000 TikTok videos. The campaign was the brainchild of Rose’s music label, Gem Street Music, a nearly year-old offshoot of the youth media juggernaut Sweety High Media, which includes a lifestyle website, growth agency, and influencer network aimed…

FOR INSERTING A “W” IN ESG AS STARBUCKS EMployees ramped up efforts to unionize, they had powerful allies. More than six dozen investors—representing some $3.4 trillion in assets—signed an open letter in March urging the company to adopt a neutral stance toward labor organizers. The effort was led by Jonas Kron, at Trillium Asset Management, which has long used its stake in corporations to push them toward ESG goals. In the past year, Kron has been rallying investors to empower workers more directly. He oversaw a similar letter to execs at the New York Times Company and penned one to EssilorLuxottica on behalf of investors representing $500 billion in assets, asking the company to cease union-busting activities. He also urged Mondelez International and Deere & Company to negotiate with striking…

FOR PREVENTING FENTANYL OVERDOSES WE WERE INSPIRED BY the fishbowl condom initiative during the AIDS crisis,” says Alison Heller, who founded the drug-test-strip distribution nonprofit FentCheck with Dean Shold in 2019. The two met at Burning Man and realized they shared an interest in harm reduction amid an uptick in fentanyl-related overdose deaths in their Oakland, California, community. Fentanyl, a synthetic opioid that Shold says can be 100 times more powerful than morphine, is increasingly being found in the kinds of recreational drugs used by young people; Kaiser Family Foundation reported 1,457 opioid overdose deaths in California in 2020 among 25-to-34-year-olds, the age group with the highest mortality rate in the state. They decided to act, procuring fentanyl test strips from Canadian biotech company BTNX and distributing them in parks…

FOR DOMINATING ON NBA TWITTER OF ALL THE ONLINE COMMUNIties where experts and enthusiasts interact, none may be more fearsome to break into than NBA Twitter. Fans have to go into the paint with some of the game’s biggest stars, who hang out and dish about the game year-round. Former UCLA forward Josiah Johnson, though, has become the “king of #NBATwitter,” as the Los Angeles Times declared in June, the same month that LeBron James called him the greatest of all time. “A lot of people don’t quite get the social part of social media,” Johnson says. “You need to be creating and evolving conversations.” He got 130,000 likes for an absurdly extreme workout meme during the NBA Finals with the caption “How Steph Carrying the Warriors” and more than…

FOR CREATING A VIDEO GAME THAT TREATS CHARACTERS LIKE REAL PEOPLE YOU AND YOUR WIFE ARE ENjoying dessert when there’s a knock at the door. It’s the police. The officer enters, zip-ties your wife’s hands, and interrogates her. When you try to stop him, violence ensues, a cello string gets plucked, and your day resets. This is Twelve Minutes, the indie video game released last summer that’s like Groundhog Day reimagined as a psychological thriller. As players loop through the story line (which resets whenever you leave the apartment or die, or whenever 12 minutes have passed), they must piece together what is happening. The game was written, coded, and designed by Luis Antonio, a Ubisoft and Rockstar Games vet who helped create 2016’s The Witness. He worked mostly solo…

FOR DEVELOPING REAL ESTATE DEVELOPERS THE STORY IS A COMMON ONE: A city, or some part of it, languishes in blight and poverty until one day, investors see opportunity in the cheap real estate. They redevelop homes and even entire streets, and suddenly the city has changed—without any input from longtime residents. Ellis Carr, president and CEO of Momentus Capital, which includes the community development financial institution Capital Impact Partners and other companies, saw this happening over the past decade in Detroit as the organization he runs invested in redevelopment efforts, from affordable housing to retail. He realized that a majority of the individuals who received funding were not people of color, in a city that was 80% Black. So four years ago, he launched the Equitable Development Initiative, a…

FOR REPRESENTING THE PEOPLE AGAINST BIG TECH MAY 9, 2022, WAS A hell of a day for digital privacy champions, thanks in large part to attorney Jay Edelson. That was the day that Facebook began paying out a record $650 million settlement stemming from a first-of-its-kind lawsuit that Edelson’s Chicago-based firm filed in 2015, which accused the social media giant of violating Illinois’s biometric privacy law by collecting and storing facial recognition data. (Facebook halted its program last November.) It was also the day that Edelson won his suit against Clearview AI, brought pro bono on behalf of the ACLU, which charged that the company was illegally scraping images and converting them into vector-based “faceprints.” Clearview AI, valued at $130 million, agreed to cease allowing private U.S. organizations, such as…

FOR EMPOWERING WORKERS ON THE FRONT LINES OF CLIMATE CHANGE IN A WORLD HAMMERED BY CLImate change, natural disasters like tornadoes, hurricanes, floods, and fires are becoming a grim way of life, especially for the labor force that treks from one region to another to perform disaster recovery work. Too often, that means toiling in dangerous conditions with virtually no labor protections, and—especially for those who are undocumented—being vulnerable to wage theft and other abuses. “These [are] the equivalents of the farmworkers of yesteryear, who would travel from crop to crop, season after season” without any recourse against bad employers, says Saket Soni, cofounder of the nonprofit Resilience Force. Soni started his organization five years ago to advocate for these workers and reframe their labor as indispensable in an era…

DON’T CALL IT A FLYING CAR. THE VEHICLE, WHICH LOOKS LIKE A SPACE-AGE TADPOLE THAT’S SPROUTED SPIKE-TIPPED WINGS, CAN TAKE OFF AND LAND VERTICALLY, MEANING THAT IT DOESN’T REQUIRE A RUNWAY, AND ONCE IT’S ALOFT, IT FLIES LIKE A SMALL AIRPLANE. MAKE THE MISTAKE OF REFERRING TO ONE OF THESE NOT-HELICOPTER-NOT-AIRPLANES AS A “FLYING CAR” TO ANYONE IN THE BURGEONING MARKET, AND INVARIABLY THEY’LL SQUAWK: IT SOUNDS TOO MUCH LIKE SCIENCE FICTION, LIKE SOMETHING THAT IS NEVER GONNA HAPPEN. (THEY ALSO HATE THE JETSONS THEME SONG AND CAN RECALL WITH SURPRISING ACCURACY EVERY NEWS PROGRAM THAT HAS USED IT.) AS YOU BOARD, ARROWS guide you across a kind of bridge that weighs you. Infrared sensors detect if your luggage is hard-or soft-backed, and more important, if you have to wait…

THE PEOPLE PLEASER LIZ LEMON ► Habitat: New York media and entertainment conglomerate ► Characteristics: Cajoles recalcitrant team; strokes C-suite egos; maintains zero work-life balance THE TOXIC BOSS PETE CAMPBELL ► Habitat: Mid-century advertising agency ► Characteristics: Steals ideas; undermines colleagues; inspires Me Too movement THE OPTIMIST LESLIE KNOPE ► Habitat: Local city government ► Characteristics: Infuses workplace with vision, determination, and relentless energy; exhausts colleagues THE WANNABE BFF MICHAEL SCOTT ► Habitat: Backwater outpost of large paper company ►Characteristics: Distracts employees and neglects basic management duties in attempt to befriend staffers THE UNRELIABLE COLLEAGUE FREDO CORLEONE ► Habitat: Tightly held family business ► Characteristics: Relies on nepotism for promotions; leaks trade secrets; goes fishing and never returns THE ONE WHO SHOULD BE IN CHARGE VIOLET NEWSTEAD ► Habitat: Misogynistic…

Inspired by the 1968 landmark album and movie, Theory11’s “Yellow Submarine” playing cards add a psychedelic flair to classic games. The standard-size cards, which are enlarged here, feature illustrations from the Beatles’ wacky world. Hit PLAY on the iconic album and start dealing. Trouble understanding a game? You’ll get by with a little help from your friends. ($12, theory11.com)…

01 N.Y. State of Mind NAS I live in New York City during the offseason. [It gives me a] different mindset and hustle. Channeling that song gives me life. 02 I’m on One FUTURE FT. DRAKE The title speaks for itself. A great trap collaboration. 03 Intro (The Dynasty) JAY-Z This was the Cavaliers’ intro track when I was a rookie in ’08-’09. When I saw it performed live, I was mesmerized. 04 Blue Notes (DC4) MEEK MILL This came out in 2016—the year we won it all. Music has a way of taking you back. CROSSWORD ACROSS 1 Competitive game at the nursing home 4 Animal that takes over Earth in Andy Serkis’s adapted video game 5 Video game IRL, typically played in a park 7 One who roots…

Jay Dragon, CEO, Possum Creek Games 01 The Ultimate Micro-RPG Book JAMES D’AMATO This is a great look into the breadth and depth of the indie tabletop RPG scene. The games are quick to learn. 02 Ribbon Drive AVERY ALDER The tabletop roleplaying game about going on a road trip uses mixtapes to shape the world around it. 03 I’m Sorry Did You Say Street Magic? CARO ASERCION A building game that fills cities with enough magic and beauty as to make Italo Calvino blush. 04 Under Hollow Hills MEGUEY AND VINCENT BAKER This is a fantastical game about a circus of faeries whose moods, genders, and worlds change with the seasons. Hay Play, Backgammon ($45, DWR.COM) This compact backgammon set comes with contrasting red and blue pieces that will…

BEST WORKPLACES FOR INNOVATORS The great promise of metaverse technology is a world in which virtual reality affects how we learn and interact with each other. One example, in use right now, is how global skincare company Dermalogica is utilizing this technology to train skin therapists around the world. Using software called Metahuman Creator—which allows designers to create photorealistic faces with a wide range of features and skin tone—Dermalogica’s global education team developed “Natalia,” an avatar whose appearance changes to show how facial skin and muscle change over time. The idea for Natalia came from an unexpected place: an employee in the company’s sales department. An avid gamer, he saw the potential in using gaming software for skin education. Dermalogica fosters a culture of skill development in which employees are…

Alaska Airlines SEATAC, WA FLYWAYS AI BENEFITS • 2.8 MINUTES SAVED PER ROUTE • 10.9 MILLION POUNDS OF FUEL SAVED SINCE IMPLEMENTATION • 17,300 TONS OF CARBON EMISSIONS ELIMINATED SINCE IMPLEMENTATION Seeking to streamline the information that flight dispatchers have to juggle, Alaska Airlines pilot and head of corporate development Pasha Saleh enlisted the help of Airspace Intelligence CEO Phillip Buckendorf. Their idea—to apply autonomous vehicle technology to planes—led to a new product, Flyways AI, which optimizes routes for weather conditions and traffic. AI-determined routes shorten flights, save fuel, and reduce carbon emissions.…

BEST WORKPLACES FOR INNOVATORS Supply chains—the increasingly vast and complex networks that link companies with their suppliers—have been a hot mess since the pandemic started. But not so for American Eagle Outfitters. While other companies were tied up in supply snarls, the Pittsburgh, PA-based clothing and lifestyle retailer was reimagining its supply chain: developing a revolutionary, open-network model and turning it into a thriving business line. Today, 50 companies share its platform—helping them improve inventory security, make faster deliveries, and boost efficiency. “We saw very early where the world was heading with supply chains,” says Shekar Natarajan, American Eagle’s chief global supply chain officer. “We developed a very bold vision and empowered our people to create it.” This vision—and the company’s approach to turning that vision into a transformative and…

BEST WORKPLACES FOR INNOVATORS Interacting with healthcare providers while dealing with a medical issue can be an anxiety-raising experience: on top of concerns about your own wellbeing, there are financial worries and the frustrations of navigating a complex bureaucracy. It’s even more fraught for patients who are transgender or non-binary—those individuals who often encounter obstacles in many settings, including healthcare. Which is why forward-thinking companies that are seeking ways to improve the customer experience are also bolstering gender-affirming care. Athenahealth—the Watertown, MA-based company that creates innovative healthcare technology connecting clinicians, patients, payers, and partners through electronic health records, revenue cycle management, and patient engagement tools—held it first companywide hackathon, in which employees were tasked with developing code-based product enhancements and other new solutions that would bridge equity gaps in healthcare.…

FOR TAKING A NATURAL APPROACH TO INCLUSIVE BEAUTY WITH THE “NO-MAKEUP MAKEUP” look trending, cosmetic brands have been pushing out products that promise to enhance users’ natural beauty. But Ami Colé founder Diarrha N’Diaye-Mbaye found that BIPOC customers who want to prioritize a bare face have limited options. “I wanted to have a five-minute makeup look,” she says. But “everything on the market either didn’t have my complexion or shade, or [was] not as thoughtful in terms of undertones.” The Senegalese American, who previously worked in marketing at L’Oréal and in product development at Glossier, set out to change that with her one-year-old clean beauty brand, Ami Colé. To develop her first set of products—a conditioning lip oil (which has sold out and been wait-listed twice), highlighter, and flexible skin…

FOR PULLING OFF AN OTHERWORLDLY PUPPETRY CHALLENGE JAPANESE ANIMAtion legend Hayao Miyazaki is famously protective of his creations, so it was no small thing when his production company agreed to let theater director John Caird mount a live stage version of Miyazaki’s most beloved work, Spirited Away. Caird had promised not to overdo the high-tech effects. This meant that it fell upon U.K.-based puppet master Toby Olié to imagine how the 2001 Oscar-winning movie’s spirits and gods would interact with human actors in the physical world. Olié, who had helped create puppets for stage versions of Animal Farm and Pinocchio, was inspired by fan art on forums such as Pinterest, where artists working in all kinds of media create detailed, photorealistic versions of Miyazaki’s stylistically restrained, two-dimensional characters. The result…

FOR PUNCTURING THE WEB3 HYPE SOFTWARE ENGINEER Molly White created the website Web3 Is Going Just Great in December 2021. Last year, the idea of “Web3”—a revolutionary new internet built on blockchain technology, which purported to be democratic and censorship-free—exploded on the scene, as Hollywood celebrities flaunted their Bored Ape NFTs and venture firm A16z invested billions in crypto-related endeavors. But White was having none of it. Amid the hype, she set out to expose what she calls “an enormous grift that’s pouring lighter fluid on our already smoldering planet.” Her site and companion Twitter feed document the flops, scams, hacks, and scandals rife within Web3. White posts updates nearly every day and is meticulous in her citations. To hammer home the cost of what she describes as a “harmful…

FOR SENDING THEATERGOERS FOR A ONE-OF-A-KIND LOOP IN JUNE, WHEN MICHAEL R. Jackson’s A Strange Loop won best musical at the Tonys, Broadway fans were hardly surprised. For months, the musical had been generating buzz (and $6 million in box office) on rave reviews and a 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. And yet, A Strange Loop is an atypical Tony winner: It’s a postmodern hall of mirrors about a poor, young, Black, queer man named Usher, who is employed as an actual usher at a Broadway theater while he struggles to write a semi-autobiographical Broadway musical. Supporting actors give voice to Usher’s thoughts, which involve self-loathing, repressed sexuality, and significantly more profanity than patrons of Broadway’s Lyceum Theatre are used to. How does it feel to work on a project…

FOR REINFORCING BRAVERY AS UKRAINE’S BRAND ON FEBRUARY 24, WORK AT KYIV-BASED ad agency Banda stopped. Russia had invaded Ukraine. After helping coworkers and his own family members move abroad, cofounder and chief creative officer Pavel Vrzheshch and his team made a decision: “We needed to transform from a creative agency to creative forces for Ukraine, to start to do everything as creative warriors.” Soon, he says, “we started to think about promoting Ukraine as a brand.” The result was the “Be Brave Like Ukraine” campaign, which Vrzheshch eventually showed to President Zelensky. In a global address in April, Zelensky announced, “This is our brand. This is what it means to be us. To be Ukrainians. To be brave.” The campaign is now running in 18 countries, including the U.S.,…

FOR STEERING BRANDS THROUGH DIFFICULT CONVERSATIONS SHANNON WASHINGTON HAS become a go-to creative mind for corporate brands that want to weave no-nonsense, inclusive messaging into their campaigns. Washington, promoted last year to co-lead creative in R/GA’s New York office, has since won awards for a Sephora campaign that declares “Black Beauty Is Beauty” and Uber’s “Vaccinate the Block,” an ad starring Spike Lee that offered free rides to vaccine sites for people in underserved neighborhoods. (R/GA reportedly generated $400 million in revenue in 2021.) Underlying Washington’s work is a desire to distill complicated conversations about race, gender, and commerce into tangible, memorable insights. For Sephora, she and her team homed in on the revelation that when users search on Google for the phrase “Black beauty,” the top result is often…

FOR CONNECTING GAMERS WITH PROS IN A WAY THAT EVERYONE WINS WHEN FORMER PROgamer Josh Fabian set out to create Metafy, a service that links average video-game players with professionals for live coaching, he asked himself: Who should his customers be, the students or the coaches? Fabian knew that other game-coaching services had chosen to prioritize students; they make money from fees that coaches pay, which he says can reach up to 30%. “But when a coach is a product on the shelf, they don’t make a living,” he says. Having struggled financially himself as a gamer—he became a top-20 player of Clash Royale in 2016 but still didn’t make anything close to his former salary as a lead designer at Groupon—Fabian saw an opportunity for Metafy to offer pros…

FOR (REALLY) MOVING THE NEEDLE MAXINE BÉDAT RUMMAGED through a mountainous, burning landfill site outside of Accra, Ghana, as it belched toxic fumes. It was 2019, and the site was filled with foreign-label apparel and accessories—illustrating the billion pounds of used clothing that the U.S. exports each year, the result of “the gross overproduction and undervaluing of garments,” as Bédat writes in her book Unraveled. Published last summer, Unraveled follows a pair of jeans from the farms where their cotton is grown to the global factories where they’re made, and finally, to their disposal, showcasing how the apparel industry is reshaping the world. Bédat, who also founded the New Standard Institute, dedicated to reforming the fashion industry, worked in February with New York state lawmakers to introduce the Fashion Sustainability…

FOR TEACHING STUDENT JOURNALISTS HOW TO GET TO THE TRUTH IN 2017, NEW YORK TIMES journalists Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey published the results of their 18-month investigation into movie mogul Harvey Weinstein’s long-covered-up history of sexual harassment and assault. Their reporting earned them a Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, helped fuel the Me Too movement, and led to the eventual trial and conviction of Weinstein. They wrote a book about pursuing the story, called She Said; a film adaptation is due in theaters in November. They wrote another book, Chasing the Truth, which came out last fall and targeted a new audience: high school and college-age journalists. Kantor says that they were inspired by the young journalists who flocked to their 2017 book tour for She Said, full of…

FOR DEVISING A SUN POWERED SOLUTION RISING TEMPERATURES, LIGHT pollution, and carbon emissions are major problems for cities. Anai Green is tackling all three with LumiWeave, a smart, solarcell-embedded fabric that can be hung like a canopy in public spaces to provide shade. During the day, the sheet’s flexible photovoltaic panels absorb sunlight; at night, they power LED lights for anyone below. The beauty of Green’s design lies in its simplicity: It requires minimal installation or upkeep, motion sensors detect people in the vicinity and adjust light accordingly, and one day of sun can provide at least three nights of illumination. Green, who has experience in lighting and furniture design, started developing LumiWeave two years ago to address some of climate change’s most devastating effects, particularly in Tel Aviv, Israel,…

FOR CLEANING UP CONSTRUCTION PROFIT MARGINS in construction rely heavily on the low-cost production of materials such as lumber, concrete, and steel, which can be procured from locations like China and Russia that have troubling human rights records. “You’re subsidizing ROIs with slavery,” says Sharon Prince, who runs the humanitarian nonprofit Grace Farms Foundation. In 2020, she launched the Design for Freedom movement, a partnership now led by 80 construction industry leaders that tracks building materials made with slave labor and works to get those products out of the supply chain. Notably, she persuaded construction giant Turner and the world’s largest architecture firm, Gensler, to develop internal systems to ensure that the materials they use aren’t made with forced labor.…

FOR REDESIGNING CANES, WALKERS, AND MORE FOR CVS IN FEBRUARY, MIchael Graves Architecture & Design (MGA&D) launched a groundbreaking line of affordable, beautiful, and highly usable accessibility products for CVS, available online and in more than 6,000 stores and starting at just $40. The brainchild of Rob Van Varick (who approached CVS with the idea; he was mentored by Michael Graves, who used a wheelchair before he died), it includes an anodized aluminum cane, a commode so stylish that it can fit in a living room, and a walker with a single-column front inspired by bicycles. Each item has been designed for improved function: The foldable cane can unfurl with the flip of a wrist, the walker is light and maneuverable, and the commode converts into an adjustable chair. “Who…

FOR FOSTERING THE FUTURE OF COMPUTING FOR SNAP, AUGmented reality isn’t a theoretical future trend. It’s a thriving part of the Snapchat experience, enjoyed by 250 million of its users daily. More than 250,000 developers—working everywhere from concert promotion company Live Nation to New York City’s Department of Environmental Protection—are able to create AR Snapchat “lenses” for all those app users because Snap’s head of AR platform partnerships, Sophia Dominguez, educates developers about what’s possible. Meanwhile, “It’s only through [creators] that we’re going to help realize the future of augmented reality,” says Dominguez, who makes sure that their input assists in shaping Snap’s AR road map. Although the most familiar Snapchat lenses may be silly special effects, like turning a user into a rainbow-puking unicorn, Dominguez, who has spent her…

FOR HUMANIZING THE REFUGEE CRISIS WITH A 12-FOOT-TALL PUPPET THE STORY WE WANTED TO TELL WAS OF A YOUNG refugee—her challenges, her experiences on this long odyssey,” says Palestinian playwright and director Amir Nizar Zuabi, artistic director of The Walk. Conceived as a moving production by Good Chance Theatre in association with Handspring Puppet Company, the traveling public art festival followed Little Amal, a 10-year-old Syrian refugee girl-who happens to be a 12-foot-tall puppet—on a four-month, nearly 5,000-mile journey to find her mother that started in July 2021 at the Syria-Turkey border and ended in the U.K. The Walk, with multiple scheduled events a day in 65 cities across 12 countries, was remarkable in that it shifted focus away from the despair associated with refugees and saluted their hope and…