Explore the full 2022 list of Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies, 528 organizations whose efforts are reshaping their businesses, industries, and the broader culture. We’ve selected the firms making the biggest impact with their initiatives across 52 categories, including the most innovative media, design, and consumer goods companies.
In business, the best math is one plus one equals three. Joint ventures, whether it’s a formal creation of a new company or organization, a savvy, strategic partnership, or a perfect collaboration, can deliver outsize benefits to each participant. Often these initiatives take the form of achieving a greater societal goal, like combatting climate change, but it can be as simple as delighting fans with an unexpected pairing such as the over-the-top artistic creations from Drake and Chrome Hearts to get people excited about the superstar’s Certified Lover Boy album.
Climate change, of course, is top of mind for many businesses (as it should be), and the LEAF Coalition is a notable team up of businesses, spurred in part by Salesforce, to pay countries to protect their forests on top of other commitments these companies have made to mitigate their carbon footprints. Allbirds and Adidas are doing their own part to make fighting climate change cool, teaming up on a shoe that brings each company’s advancements in minimizing the CO2e of their products into one running shoe that’s light on the feet and the planet—and looks damn good. Lynk & Co, a formal joint venture between Volvo and Geely, is adding a sheen of sophistication and pizazz to sharing electric vehicles, making it a club you very much want to be a member of across Europe. Polaris and Zero Motorcycles are bringing that same kind of excitement from the streets of European capitals to the dirt roads of America’s woods, with Zero’s electric powertrain fueling Polaris’s next-generation Ranger utility terrain vehicle.
Beyond climate change, innovative joint ventures can achieve other important goals. Saylists, created by Warner Music Group and the Accenture Interactive agency Rothco, uses the emotional power of popular music to help kids overcome speech sound disorders. The online education companies 2U and Guild Education partnered to bring a wider variety of courses to the employees of companies such as Chipotle and Walmart to advance their skills and careers. Asana and Vimeo integrated video into Asana’s workplace management platform to bring the resonance of facial cues and voice to everyday corporate communication. As blockchain technology becomes more mainstream and embraced by institutions, it’s companies like Chainalysis and Notabene which are helping to ensure that these businesses can abide by securities laws when transacting in cryptocurrency.
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