From drones delivering blood in Rwanda to employees driving sustainability in Brazil to doctors and nurses making healthcare more efficient in southern California, this year’s Impact Awards focus on people and companies that are shaking things up in constructive ways.
Launched in 2018, the Impact Awards celebrate the people and teams inside big organizations delivering tangible value — and disrupting the status quo — with new ideas.
For 2024, we’re recognizing 11 winners. Some companies nominated their own initiatives, while others were submitted to the process by InnoLead partners or our editorial team. All were evaluated on the merits of the entry in an unbiased process.
Winners will be honored at the Impact 2024 conference, which takes place October 23-25 in Boston.
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Our 2024 Impact Award Winners…
Apple — AirPods Hearing Aid Feature
In September 2024, the Food and Drug Administration approved a new feature that will deploy this fall via a free software update for Apple’s AirPods Pro 2 ear buds. The feature will amplify sounds for people with mild to moderate hearing impairment.
More than 30 million adults in the US suffer from some degree of hearing loss. But fewer than 20 percent of Americans with hearing loss between the ages of 20 and 69 actually use hearing aids due to high cost, social stigma, and bad user experience. Apple is poised to change that with a digital hearing test that takes less than five minutes, is performed on an iPhone, and instantly adjusts a pair of AirPods ($249) to help them hear better. This could one of Apple’s biggest disruptions of an established market: roughly $7 billion in hearing aids are sold globally each year, according to analyst estimates.
Birla Carbon — BiiG Innovation
Supporting Firms: HYPE Innovation and Systematic Inventive Thinking
Headquartered in Mumbai, India, Birla Carbon is the world’s largest producer of carbon black. What’s that? Carbon black is mainly used to strengthen rubber in tires, but it can also be employed as a pigment, UV stabilizer, and insulating agent. Birla Carbon’s “Share the Idea” initiative, launched in 2019, fosters a culture of innovation across global operations. By 2023, the program expanded to over 500 employees across 11 countries, with four winning ideas implemented, and nine others in process. One notable project eliminated all single-use plastics — about 150,000 plastic bottles annually — at a Brazil plant, saving $42,000 a year.
Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport — Reimagining Terminal Exit Doors
Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport is the world’s third busiest airport, with its passenger count jumping 11 percent from 2022 to 2023, according to Airports Council International. Facing post-Covid staffing challenges and security risks, DFW Airport implemented automated exit lanes in 2023 to replace some of its traditional, staff-monitored exit doors. The technology increased operational efficiency, reduced passenger exit times from five to three seconds, and eliminated security breaches. The pilot program, involving over 700,000 passengers, was so successful that DFW plans to roll out the technology airport-wide — an effort that may cost $50 million, but with a strong return on investment.
The Doctors Company — Advanced Practice Clinicians Initiative: Digital Platform and Credentials for Direct-to-Consumer New Product
Headquartered in Napa, California, The Doctors Company is the nation’s largest physician-owned medical malpractice insurer. To support a new line of business targeting an emerging market, The Doctors Company built a digital automated underwriting platform. The emerging market is known as Advanced Practice Clinicians, a group that includes non-MDs like nurse practitioners, physician assistants, and certified nurse-midwives. The new platform, developed in just 16 months, led to a faster, more efficient user experience. Within three months post-launch, the platform had generated 500 new policies, $1.8 million in premiums, and reduced underwriting expenses by about five percent. The initiative also promoted healthcare equity by supporting nurse practitioners and physician assistants, who are critical in underserved areas, where primary care docs can often be in short supply.
Meta and Ray-Ban — Smart Glasses You’d Actually Wear
Did a collaboration between Meta, the social networking giant, and Luxottica Group, the Italian eyewear maker that owns Ray-Ban, finally make smart glasses cool? Launched in October 2023, the Meta smartglasses aren’t able to project digital imagery onto your field of view (yet), but they integrate a 12 megapixel camera for taking high-quality photos and 1080p videos, open-ear speakers, and hands-free capabilities powered by Meta AI. You can capture moments, livestream to social media, make calls, and interact with Meta’s AI assistant without pulling out your smartphone. One example: “Hey Meta, what kind of butterfly I am looking at?” While Meta hasn’t disclosed specific sales figures, the company has reported that they are “selling out faster than we can make them,” and analysts estimate that the company has sold about a million pairs across several different versions of the product.
Novartis Pharmaceuticals — Maturation of an Embedded, Sustainable Innovation Program
The Technical Research and Development (TRD) group within the Swiss biopharma giant Novartis launched an innovation program in 2018 that transformed the organization’s approach to developing new medicines and clinical supply infrastructure.
“During and following the pandemic, Novartis underwent a significant transformation, focusing on becoming a pure-play innovative medicines company and restructuring its business operations,” according to the award submission. “Noteworthy for TRD was an added emphasis on bridging the gaps between Research, Development, and Commercial operations, with [TRD] positioned at the critical interface between research and commercial in the continuum.”
By 2023, the program had executed 35 projects, involving over 1,000 associates and delivering over $3 million in net benefits. These projects supported the development of new targeted cancer therapies like Lutathera and Pluvicto. The innovation program also focused on employee development, with groups like TRD’s WISE (Women in Innovation Science and Engineering) fostering diversity and inclusivity. The TRD Innovation Program, cited as a “best new initiative” in InnoLead’s 2020 Impact Awards is now “fully embedded in all that we do, and its outputs are continual, demonstrable, and diverse in nature,” according to the award submission.
Rockwell Automation — Global Innovation Challenge
Rockwell Automation is a Wisconsin-based maker of industrial automation technologies. The company’s annual Global Innovation Challenge fosters creative solutions by encouraging teams to submit ideas, with leadership sponsoring selected projects.
“We create early and lasting engagement with senior leaders because it’s theirs: their budgets invested, their priorities coming to life, their chosen winners to implement,” according to the award submission.
The initiative empowers over 100 teams from 23 countries to innovate, achieving significant results despite a small budget — including $50,000 for awards and one dedicated staffer. In 2024, teams were trained to use generative AI as their “copilot” as they developed ideas.
One notable idea that came through the challenge, the Digital Wiring Assistant (DWA), revolutionized the assembly process by providing step-by-step wiring instructions, resulting in a 60 percent reduction in training time, 65 percent improvement in new hire retention, and significant labor savings. The DWA now sets global standards, saving Rockwell an estimated $3-4 million annually in labor costs.
University of California San Diego Health — Improvement Excellence Awards
Supporting Firm: HYPE Innovation
UCSD Health is an academic healthcare system that operates about 1,100 beds in the San Diego, as well as primary care, urgent care, and other services. Its annual Health Improvement Excellence Awards encourage staff to lead process improvement projects that align with organizational goals.
In 2024, the initiative received 53 nominations, exceeding its goal of 20, and led to high-impact projects such as the “UCSD at Home — Emergency Department to Home” program, which coordinates care for patients leaving the emergency department through an interdisciplinary team approach. It reduced emergency department visits by more than 76 percent, while improving patient outcomes. Another project restructured the medication reconciliation process, leading to the proactive removal of 828 patient medications each month, and reducing the medications physicians need to discuss with patients by 84 percent.
The initiative fosters a culture of continuous improvement, recognizing staff contributions and promoting best practices across the organization.
Vertex Pharmaceuticals and CRISPR Therapeutics — Gene Editing to Treat Sickle Cell Disease
Biotech companies Vertex Pharmaceuticals and CRISPR Therapeutics collaborated to develop of CASGEVY, the first therapy using CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing technology to be approved by the US Food and Drug Administration. Approved by the FDA in the US December 2023, and by the EU in February 2024, this treatment for sickle cell disease extracts, modifies, and then replaces a patient’s own stem cells, so that they can start making new, healthy red blood cells.
CRISPR Therapeutics, headquartered in Switzerland, provided the gene editing technology and began developing the therapy; Boston-based Vertex handled clinical trials and regulatory approvals, and will lead its commercialization.
CASGEVY works by editing a patient’s stem cells to boost the production of fetal hemoglobin, a type of hemoglobin that facilitates oxygen delivery. That helps prevent the vaso-occlusive crises that people with sickle cell disease often experience. A vaso-occlusive crisis is a painful and sometimes dangerous complication of sickle cell disease; it happens when the misshapen, “sickle-shaped” red blood cells clump together and block small blood vessels.
In clinical trials, 29 out of 31 patients treated with CASGEVY went at least a year without any severe vaso-occlusive episodes. The treatment is now available at specialized centers across the US for patients aged 12 and up who have severe sickle cell disease, or a related blood disorder called beta thalassemia; data isn’t yet available on how many have opted to receive the new treatment, which costs $2.2 million per patient. Below, a video made by the Cleveland Clinic about CASGEVY.
Visa — The Visa Everywhere Initiative
Supporting Firm: KITE
The Visa Everywhere Initiative is a global open innovation program that looks for fintech startups that are addressing digital payments and the future of commerce. Since its inception, VEI has attracted over 15,000 applications from startups across 100 countries, acting as a “virtual front door” for fintech startups. The initiative has led to the development of groundbreaking payment platforms, increased security features, and financial inclusion solutions. The ultimate startup competition takes place at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco, where the global finalists compete for a grand prize of over $100,000.
Since its launch in 2015, participating startups have raised over $50 billion in funding.
“By supporting these global innovators, Visa is not just shaping the future of payments, but also ensuring more dynamic financial tools will reach every corner of the world,” says Vanessa Colella, Visa’s Head of Global Digital Partnerships.
Zipline — Drone Delivery Milestone
Lots of companies have been talking about drone delivery for years, and issuing press releases, but San Francisco-based Zipline is actually making it a daily reality.
Since the company was founded in 2016, Zipline has completed over one million commercial drone deliveries, revolutionizing logistics in hard-to-reach areas. In Rwanda, where Zipline initiated blood deliveries to rural hospitals in 2016, the impact has been profound. The use of drones for blood product deliveries has resulted in a 51 percent reduction in in-hospital maternal mortality from postpartum hemorrhage, and a 67 percent decrease in blood wastage across Rwanda.
Zipline’s “Zip” drones are all-electric, zero-emission aircraft. Every Zipline flight reduces the carbon emissions of deliveries by an average of 97 percent compared to cars, according to the company. Zipline has partnered with US companies like Walmart and Sweetgreen to do deliveries, and in July 2024 it earned a first-of-its-kind approval from the Federal Aviation Administration approval for an airspace traffic management system to coordinate flights among multiple drone operators flying in the same area.
Below, a Zipline video marking the milestone of one million deliveries:
Congrats to all of our 2024 Impact Award winners! And see you at Impact later this month!
