Fast Company Fall 2024

FAST COMPANY LOOKS FORWARD, RELENTLESSLY, AND always has. We cover innovation. Why look back? In certain cases, it's instructive. It allows us to understand where all this innovation has led us—and to anticipate the big shifts that might be coming next. A decade ago, we launched the first Fast Company Innovation Festival, our annual gathering of leaders, visionaries, and creators who are forging the future of business. To celebrate our 10th, which takes place in New York City from September 16 to 19, we decided to turn and glance backward—at least for a moment. We identified the most compelling advances in business over the past decade and the human forces behind them. We then created a separate cover for each one: the 10 Most Innovative People of the Last 10…

AS THE 10TH ANNUAL FAST COMPANY Innovation Festival gets set to unfold in New York City in mid-September, I can't help but look ahead. Just two months later, in November, Fast Company marks the start of its 30th year as the journalistic authority without equal in covering the global landscape of business innovation. These anniversaries give us reason not just to pause or reflect on yesterday, but to aspire to build beyond traditional boundaries. Yes, there are always lessons to learn from the past, and we should mind those. But the people and companies Fast Company reports on are experts in the future, in shaping it, building it, innovating their way through its challenges—ones they anticipated and ones that shocked them out of the blue. This is what our audience…

IN THE EARLY DAYS OF GENERATIVE AI—AKA LESS THAN TWO years ago—we flocked to ChatGPT to marvel at all that we could create: silly haikus, Shakespearean sonnets, and Seinfeld scenes. Generative AI promised limitless production, and we used it to make more media, mindlessly. To blink things into existence. But the fun quickly wore off, and a new killer function has taken over: using generative AI to compress existing stuff and restate it in simplified form. We don't live in a new creative age. We live in the age of summarization. It's easy to look at this development skeptically: This is what we get from AI tools that haven't (yet) delivered on their creative potential. But maybe these tools are simply responding to human desire. The more we create digitally,…

EARLIER THIS YEAR, ALlen Watson stopped treating himself to his favorite McDonald's meal: the biscuits-and-gravy combo with a sausage patty and Diet Coke. A startup cofounder from Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, he says the $11 he spent on the meal one January day finally shocked him into abstinence. “That's crazy to me, because the sit-down restaurants around here are almost the same price,” Watson says. For the record, he can afford the 11 bucks. But he was starting to feel “price gouged,” he says, and he doesn't like the thought of high-level executives lining their pockets while frontline workers go underpaid. “I think it's just a perception thing for me,” Watson says. “I perceive it to be too expensive, and that's why I've altered my behavior.” His comment perfectly illustrates…

Spurred by innovative treatments, roughly 80% of children diagnosed with cancer in the U.S. today will likely survive the disease. St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, in Memphis, has played a major role in this encouraging trend. Since its founding in 1962, St. Jude has made its treatments accessible regardless of a family's ability to pay. St. Jude has now renewed its focus on the rest of the world, specifically poorer countries where cancer cure rates are still around 20%—what it was in the U.S. when St. Jude first opened its doors. American Lebanese Syrian Associated Charities (ALSAC), the fundraising and awareness organization for St. Jude, is also working to close that gap. ALSAC par tners with foundations around the world to develop fundraising solutions to support improved care and outcomes…

Real innovation, says Albert G. White, president and CEO of global medical device company CooperCompanies, “is more than just a cool new product.” To him, it's also about creating a culture that drives the San Ramon, California–based company's commitments to improving the health of its patients—and providing opportunities for its more than 15,000 employees. White points to his company's nimble response to an alarming trend: the prevalence of myopia, or nearsightedness, among a generation of preteens that spends too many hours staring at tiny screens. Because CooperCompanies (NASDAQ:COO) is committed to the idea that “better eyesight should be available to everyone,” they're developing products and actively enhancing professional education, raising awareness, and creating partnerships to address healthcare inequities with the goal of making myopia control standard-of-care for children. Surgeons, too,…