last week, Fast company Hosted annually Summit of the most innovative companiesbringing together business leaders from various sectors to celebrate those who support innovation in their industries.
But what does it mean to be innovative in 2024? Deborah Golden, US Chief Innovation Officer Deloitte; Payal Sahni, Chief People Experience Officer at Pfizer; And Carsten Timme, co-founder and chief innovation officer at Axial vitalitytook to the stage to explain what innovation means to them.
Partnership over disruption
Collaboration between organizations and across industries is on the rise, according to the 2023 Innovation Excellence Survey, a special report from Fast company And Deloitte. These relationships extend from personal relationships to global ecosystems.
Sahni gave the example of one such partnership between Pfizer and Zipline, a drone delivery service that ranked 36th on this year’s MIC list. “Part of our mission is to get medicines to places and people who don’t always have access to them,” she said. “When you look at places in sub-Saharan Africa that are very difficult to get vaccines to, we partnered with Zipline to get those products there and we had someone waiting on the road. [other] end.”
At Pivot Bio, Timmy said farmers expect the company to go beyond just introducing new offerings – they want to know how Pivot products can be used alongside others in the market to achieve the optimal outcome.
“The question farmers ask most often these days isn’t ‘Prove that your product works.’ Prove that I should use it on my farm. It’s ‘Help me think about the future of fertilizers differently.’ Help me think about how I can use this innovation that changes everything.” Something that for me is in collaboration with all the other products on the market. “Everything we have to do as a company now is done through this lens of partnership, not just disruption anymore.”
Understand long-term goals
Not every company can move — nor needs to move — at the same pace, Golden explained, because capabilities vary by industry. What’s important is “making sure your vision is intentionally connected to your long-term values [are]”.
For Timmy, this means staying focused. When it comes to innovation, it can be much easier to say yes to newness. But the preoccupation with pursuing modernity can be a distraction from the organization’s overall mission.
“What I found is that the challenge for us is how do we create that space for innovation to happen? How do we find ways to say no to all the different possibilities of things that could be shiny things, so that we can be more ambitious with that destination or that journey to the destination? He said.
But staying true to a company’s mission doesn’t always mean moving slowly. Sahni said it was essential for Pfizer to act quickly during the COVID-19 pandemic to accelerate the process of creating a vaccine, and the speed at which the company worked was critical to its long-term mission.
“People were dying around us, and we had amazing scientists who said, ‘We can’t take this anymore.’” So it’s being mobilized and categorized very quickly, what things are sacred and what things are sacred. [we] Will you never be exposed? “This is patient safety for us,” she said. “We actually have a north star: ‘Time is life.’ And so the extra days we take or… [that] The procedure takes one week, less than the patient has to live or wait for the medication.
Embracing AI in the right ways
In 2024, innovation and artificial intelligence go hand in hand. But Golden believes people are over-indexing on technology and should think beyond AI’s ability to increase operational efficiency.
“When you think about the exploratory value of AI, this is where we should be spending 99% of our time: exploring [the] market,” she said. “The real value is now being able to create new businesses that we never thought we could imagine and we already have that ability to intersect. So in areas like agriculture, [we can] Allowing space technology and space data to be able to solve agricultural problems that we wouldn’t be able to solve without things like artificial intelligence.
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