Last week, Fast Company hosted its annual Most Innovative Companies Summit, bringing together business leaders across sectors to celebrate those championing innovation in their respective industries.
But what does it mean to be innovative in 2024? Deborah Golden, U.S. chief innovation officer at Deloitte; Payal Sahni, chief people experience officer at Pfizer; and Karsten Temme, cofounder and chief innovation officer at Pivot Bio, took to the stage to explain what innovation means to them.
Partnership over disruption
Collaboration among organizations and across industries is on the rise, according to the 2023 Survey of Innovation Excellence, a special report from Fast Company and Deloitte. Those relationships span from interpersonal connections to global ecosystems.
Sahni offered an example of one such partnership between Pfizer and Zipline, a drone delivery service that was number 36 on this year’s MIC list. “Part of our job is to get medicines to places and people that don’t always have access,” 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 had somebody waiting on the [other] end.”
At Pivot Bio, Temme said farmers expect the company to go beyond simply providing new offerings—they want to know how Pivot’s products can be used in conjunction with others on the market to achieve an optimal outcome.
“The question I’m most often asked by farmers 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 fertilizer differently. Help me think about how I use this innovation that’s disrupting everything for me in collaboration with all those other products that are on the market,’” he said. “Everything we’ve got to do as a company now is through this lens of partnering, and not just disrupting anymore.”
Understanding long-term goals
Not every company can move—nor needs to move—at the same pace, as capabilities vary by industry, Golden explained. What’s important is “making sure that your vision [is] very purposely tied to what your long-term values [are].”