World Changing Ideas

Amelia Hemphill, KC Ifeanyi, and Kate Davis discuss the biggest stories at Fast Company this past year and share their favorite moments from Fast Company podcasts. Amelia explains some of the most innovative approaches to sustainability, including a toilet that incinerates your bowel movement under water. KC reviews some of the biggest trends in the creator economy. Kate highlights The New Way We Work's 4-part miniseries "Ambition Diaries," which examined the effects of the pandemic on women's progress in the workplace. Finally, Kate, KC, and Amelia share their New Year's resolutions.Subscribe to World Changing Ideas, The New Way We Work, and Creative Control on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

Addressing the problems around climate change requires collective action and big ideas. But we also need to learn how to listen and how to change our perspective. This week, we speak to some leading environmental activists about storytelling and how to craft a message that sparks behavioral change. Kate Tellers - director at The Moth, a storytelling collective and nonprofit in New York City. She’s also the author of How to Tell a Story: The Essential Guide to Memorable Storytelling From The Moth. Dr. Nicole Redvers - assistant professor at the University of Western Ontario and the cofounder of the Arctic Indigenous Wellness Foundation. Winnie Cheche - wildlife conservation activist and Communication Lead at Kenya Environmental Action Network Finn Harries - designer and filmmaker, cofounder of Earthrise Studio Check out our Instagram and TikTok at Fast Company for more creative world changing ideas!

Farming is one of our most ancient practices. We can’t support human life on this planet without the food we grow from the soil. But the soil itself is also a living organism—and a crucial resource that desperately needs our global attention. December 5 is the UN’s annual World Soil Day—to bring awareness of the importance of healthy soil and ecosystems. So, let’s dig in here. . . .Apricot Lane Farms: John and Molly Chester started out not knowing much about farming but have now created a world-famous case study of soil regeneration and biodynamic farming with Apricot Lane Farms, which spans 234 acres of countryside in Moorpark, California. They’ve also built a thriving business and produced an award-winning documentary called ‘The Biggest Little Farm’ about the couple’s farming journey and the challenges along the way.Check out our Instagram and TikTok at Fast Company for more creative world changing ideas!

Reducing emissions was a hot topic at COP27, and a lot of the emissions burden is going to fall on cities and local governments. So what kind of world-changing ideas are we seeing in this space? Volksentscheid Autofrei is posing the philosophical question of how to optimize our urban spaces and taking it to the streets, literally. The movement wants to significantly reduce Berlin’s car traffic by opening up the inner city to pedestrians. The main goal was to start a forum for a democratic process, so they proposed a law the people of Berlin could vote on. Candela is aiming to overhaul the maritime industry by creating a flying boat . . . or something close to it. Its carbon fiber and proprietary software are part of a design to create an electric boat that’s both noiseless and emissions-free. The next step? Building an electric water taxi that will connect waterfront cities. Check out our Instagram and TikTok at Fast Company for more creative world changing ideas!

Kate Davis talks with Dorie Clark about how to future proof your career (as much as possible). Dorie has been a guest on the show before, she’s also a contributor to Fast Company, Harvard Business Review and others and has been named the #1 Communication Coach and one of the Top 50 Business Thinkers in the World. She teaches at both Duke and Columbia Business Schools, and she is the author of several books, including The Long Game: How to Be a Long-Term Thinker in a Short-Term World.

It’s Thanksgiving tomorrow and what better way to spend it than examining how our food is produced?While we can’t live without food, we also can’t afford to have the current agricultural industries, which grow and produce our food, continue contributing to climate change at such a rapid pace. The global population is larger than ever before, but in order for industrial agriculture to provide for everyone while not destroying the planet in the process, a lot has to change.Could bioengineered food be the next world-changing idea? We looked at three companies working on revolutionizing the food landscape:Meatable is headed by Daan Luining, who was part of the team that created the first cultivated burger. Cultivated meat requires only three months to develop versus the three years it takes for a cow to mature before it’s slaughtered for food. But how will the end product’s taste and texture measure up to traditional animal meat?Neggst is creating a completely vegan egg made from fava beans, sweet potatoes, and peas. It may fry like a chicken egg, but will it help decrease environmental degradation?Perfect Day has made an animal-free ice cream that contains the same protein found in milk but it doesn't come from cows. Its taste might be indistinguishable from our beloved cow-derived ice cream, but the verdict is still out on whether this cellular-fermentation process will make a significant dent in greenhouse gas emissions.Check out our Instagram and TikTok at Fast Company for more creative world changing ideas!

In this episode, we're taking a look at how one company and a nonprofit are working together to capture carbon. Their partnership also addresses the question of how we can make climate innovation a successful business strategy.CLIMATE VAULTClimate Vault has come up with a new way of addressing how companies can be held accountable for their carbon emissions. The nonprofit uses compliance markets to set up a verifiable and transparent way of measuring carbon offsets. And secondly, it helps invest in strategies and new technologies that remove even more carbon from entering the atmosphere.GENPACTGenpact is in the business of digital transformation and this means it’s ripe for helping companies and organizations innovate. To that end, it recently partnered with Climate Vault to build software for the nonprofit to track carbon emissions. As part of its stated mission to create a world that works better for people, Genpact has created a system to help organizations reach their carbon reduction goals.Conversation highlights: at its core, climate change is a data challenge holding companies accountable comes down to trust it’s critical to keep the carbon removal process as transparent as possible. 

From Queens, New York over to West Africa down to Southwest Florida and up to Europe, we're jumping from soil to sky in our exploration of how solar energy could power our world.Contributing WCI reporter Blake Odom investigates how you can set up solar power for your home. He looks into the installation costs, the time needed, and the potential savings.Energicity is hooking up West African countries like Sierra Leone and Liberia with solar power minigrids.Babcock Ranch is one of the few places in Florida that did not lose power when Hurricane Ian hit in September. And that's because it runs on solar power. It's a living laboratory for how we could power our towns with solar energy.Dr. Michael Harbottle is developing a way for soil to store solar energy. Bacteria in the soil will help this process by performing electrosynthesis. Wild! Especially considering how current solar batteries require lithium, which is a finite resource.The Solaris initiative is working on creating a space-based solar power to decrease energy decarbonization on Earth. Over the next decades, it could build a 2 km-long satellite over Europe that harnesses solar power directly from the sun and beams it back down to Earth!Check out our Instagram and TikTok at Fast Company for more creative world changing ideas!

We’ve talked a lot about sustainable and plant-based foods before—and on today’s show, you may get a little deja-vu. You’ll remember last year we did a live taste-test of the Beyond Burger 3.0 with Beyond Meat’s CEO, Ethan Brown. We welcomed Ethan back to chat about the latest iteration—the 4.0 Burger.Interview Highlights: Brown discusses the reiteration process and the company's ethos of relentless progress How the new plant-based steak at Taco Bell made from faba bean protein tastes Is the company disrupting and revolutionizing anymore? Or is it a legacy player now? Follow us for more innovative world changing ideas on Instagram and TikTok at Fast Company.

Most societies have a complex relationship with human poop. It brings up all kinds of emotions: disgust, fascination, shame, happiness, relief, and even pride. It’s something we can all relate to though. Everyone poops!Visit Mr. Toilet House in Suwon, South Korea where visitors from all over the world come to learn about the history of human waste.Dr. Shannon Yee is taking on Thomas Crapper for a place in the Toilets Hall of Fame. He has designed a toilet that takes the water almost completely out of the equation.Lina Zeldovich is no stranger to talking about poop-back in Russian her grandfather used their waste as compost and now she has literally written the book on poop, it's called The Other Dark Matter.Lindsay Stradley saw firsthand how combining water with human waste can lead to serious problems. She resolved to improve urban sanitation and started Sanergy, a company that provides container-based facilities and now serves over 150,000 Nairobi residents.