For the third year,
Fast Company is recognizing more than 100 organizations, leaders, and teams that have created cultures of innovation and sustained them, even as remote work extended into 2021. The companies on the Best Workplaces for Innovators list found ways to collaborate and invent despite the challenges posed by the pandemic, and in some cases applied their innovation prowess to the dilemmas of virtual work: PepsiCo, for example, teamed with BlockWorks to embed management training in the game Minecraft based on a suggestion from an employee’s child.
More employers are touting cultures of innovation to aid in recruiting. “This year we really focused on the importance of workplace and how companies are able to use innovation at work as a differentiator to attract talent,” says Paul Daugherty, group chief executive of technology and CTO at Accenture, one of our expert judges. (Accenture served as Fast Company’s research partner for the list.) And when talent and innovation intersect with mission—as it did for vaccine maker Moderna, No. 1 on the Best Workplaces for Innovators ranking-the results are not just powerful, they can help change the world. –Stephanie Mehta
RANK - WHO
1 - Moderna
CAMBRIDGE MA
Has any company’s first commercial product ever made a more heroic debut? Launched in 2010 as ModeRNA Therapeutics to harness the potential of messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) for the development of new drugs, Moderna had been studying the MERS virus in a two-year collaboration with the National Institutes of Health when reports of a strange new disease began emerging from China. On January 11, 2020, Chinese authorities shared the genetic sequence of the novel coronavirus, and within two days the Moderna/NIH research team had completed the sequence for a COVID-19 vaccine (see page 82). When Moderna finished its accelerated clinical trials by December, its vaccine showed a 94% efficacy rate against COVID-19. By June 2021, Moderna had supplied more than 200 million vaccine doses in the U.S.
Moderna accomplished this at a time when, like every other company, it was forced by
