Innholdsfortegnelse for Fall 2024 i Fast Company

About 415,000 dogs and cats are killed every year in animal shelters across the U.S. because they don't have safe places to call home. One of the contributing factors, experts have come to realize, is a knowledge gap in the field of animal services. Leading the efforts to close that gap is a national animal welfare organzation widely recognized for its mission to end the killing of pets in shelters. Best Friends Animal Society—headquartered in Kanab, Utah—has partnered with Southern Utah University (SUU) to develop the nation's first universityendorsed animal services leadership program. Together, they've developed a curriculum made up of almost 150 animal-services learning modules and eight courses, filling the knowledge gap by educating animal-care leaders in proven industry-lifesaving practices and data-driven decision-making. “This program is the most cuttingedge…

01 Grab a premium seat- there are more of them. Business fliers whose spending limits allow for upgrades have a growing number of opportunities to escape economy class. That's because carriers— which know deep-pocketed corporate passengers boost margins—have been increasing their business and premium economy seat counts, especially on trans- and intercontinental routes. American Airlines, in particular, has been investing in upscale offerings that CEO Robert Isom calls “one of the bright spots” of the business. Key to that investment are its forthcoming Flagship Suites, which will feature sliding doors for maximum privacy along with lie-flat seats and exclusive amenity kits. These suites will debut on new long-haul, mostly international aircraft, and will replace America's Flagship First seats on older planes. The suites will be joined by new luxe, recliner-style premium…

“WELCOME TO THE FRONT PAGE OF THE INTERNET.” EVERYONE WHO ENTERS REDDIT'S SAN FRANCISCO HEADQUARTERS IS GREETED BY THAT PHRASE, EMBLAZONED RIGHT ABOVE THE FRONT DOOR IN BOLD RED LETTERING. IT'S HOW THE COMPANY HAS DESCRIBED ITSELF FOR YEARS. BUT COFOUNDER AND CEO STEVE HUFFMAN ACKNOWLEDGES THAT IT NO LONGER CAPTURES THE SPRAWLING, 19-YEAR-OLD COMMUNITY SITE'S ESSENCE. Likening Reddit to a newspaper's front page was originally “an aspirational joke,” he tells me. “And then maybe it felt more true than not for a while.” That was the mid-aughts, when much of the action took place on the site's homepage, a list of links from around the web submitted by users and ranked by interestingness via upvoting and downvoting. The results amounted to a snapshot of what the internet was obsessing…

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…

A FEW MONTHS AGO, I saw something out of the corner of my eye when I stopped off at Boccato's Groceries in Hermosa Beach, California. Something I hadn't seen in 45 years. Something I assumed that I'd never see again. The bright orange wrapper with bold blue lettering was exactly how I remembered it from when I was a 9-year-old with a sweet tooth in the late 1970s. And once again, I was drawn to it like a mosquito to a bug zapper. Standing in the checkout line, I put down the case of bottled water my wife had sent me to pick up and began racing through some quick math: Twenty dollars divided by $2.99 equals… six! I had enough for six Reggie Bars. I walked out of the…

The supermarket industry—as one would expect in a notoriously cutthroat low-margin business— is dominated by massive global corporations. But a smaller player, Alex Lee—the parent company to Merchants Distributors, Lowes Foods, W. Lee Flowers, Souto Foods, and Import Mex—has shown that nimbleness and innovation can level the playing field. And many of its successes come from a culture that taps into the creativity of its employees, vendors, and community members. “There's a David versus Goliath mindset at Alex Lee that helps with innovation,” says Robert Vipperman, the chief people and strategy officer of the North Carolina– based company. “We have to be more devoted to the customer, more willing to change, more willing to try new things.” These innovation initiatives—including a wildly popular program based on a hit reality-TV series—have…

01 Lenovo BEIJING AND MORRISVILLE, NC THE WORLD'S LARGEST PC MANUFACTURER, WITH GLOBAL HEADQUARters in Beijing and Morrisville, North Carolina, has committed to a three-year, $2.2 billion investment to expand its R&D centers, training, staff, and partnerships in support of AI innovation. Twenty-five percent of the company's employees work in some capacity of R&D, and the company's focus on AI is creating breakthroughs like a new technology (designed in collaboration with the Brazilian innovation center CESAR) that translates the Libras sign language in real time. The AI recognizes hand positions and finger articulation, converting the sign language into text and voice, expanding the potential for communication by video for millions of deaf and hard-of-hearing people. 1. Lenovo 2. Dentsu Creative Mexico 3. Trimble 4. X, the moon-shot factory 5. Akbank 6.…

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,…

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,…

Electronic display screens in every size and form — including those used in smartphones, computer monitors, tablets, and televisions — have become a dominant mode of inter facing with the world. In this current environment, two factors have become especially important: power usage and image quality. Universal Display Corporation (UDC), a leading inventor and developer of organic light-emitting diode (OLED) technologies and materials, has been busy innovating in both these areas. Since 2015, energy-savings from their materials used in OLED smartphone displays have helped reduce power consumption in those screens by 68%. And its goal of delivering high-performance and eco-friendly display experiences (to both consumers and professionals) has spurred UDC's more than 6,000 OLED-related patents, which include advancements that have helped enable OLED screens to be foldable, rollable, thinner, and…

OVER THE PAST TWO YEARS, AI has had a transformational effect on the business landscape. The technology's potential to increase creative output, enhance worker productivity, and eliminate jobs has been debated ad nauseam. But one aspect of AI's proliferation has flown under the radar, or at least not gotten the attention it deserves: how it will affect social impact. At Fast Company's annual Impact Council meeting, which took place on June 3 at the New York Stock Exchange, we brought together a collection of top business leaders from within the Impact Council and elsewhere to explore whether this transformative wave of technology can unlock creative solutions and help mission-driven companies achieve their goals beyond the bottom line. How can it be used to build a diverse workforce and an equitable…

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