UpTrajectory Review

Fast Company has assembled a dozen founders and CEOs for its annual Innovation Festival and, in advance, asked each to define what 'innovation' actually means to them in 2026. The resulting collection is less a coherent manifesto than a Rorschach test revealing how differently the term functions across industries and leadership styles. Martha Stewart frames it as technology in service of human expertise; Sean Sherman, the Sioux Chef, ties it to Lakota values and seven-generation sustainability; Lindsay Shumlas of Cotopaxi emphasizes consumer insight over novelty; and Adidas CEO Bjørn Gulden retreats to familiar customer-centricity. The throughline, if there is one, is that each definition doubles as brand positioning.

For small-business operators, this exercise matters because 'innovation' is likely eating your budget right now. Whether you are paying for software subscriptions, redesigning a product line, or simply trying to differentiate from competitors, the word gets weaponized against you by vendors and consultants who profit from your uncertainty. What Fast Company's collection usefully surfaces is that there is no single correct definition to adopt. The more important task is choosing one deliberately and measuring your investments against it. If you are Cotopaxi, that means deep consumer research; if you are a local service business, it might mean exactly what Jake Bull suggests: designing for an N of 1, a specific customer whose obsession with your work becomes your marketing engine.

The genuinely new tension here is between Bull's entrepreneurial individualism and the corporate polish of the larger brands. His line about committees producing generic products that 'excite no one' lands as a quiet indictment of the very festival format he is participating in, where curated panels and speaker lineups risk producing exactly the homogenized wisdom he criticizes. We are skeptical of Gulden's Adidas answer, which is indistinguishable from what any consumer goods CEO might have said in 1996 or 2006. It is not wrong, but it is not actionable either. Sherman's seven-generation frame, by contrast, is the most substantively distinctive and the hardest to fake, because it commits to a measurable standard that most quarterly-driven businesses will fail.

The downstream effects of these competing definitions shape who gets funded, who gets featured, and who gets copied. If 'innovation' in 2026 is understood primarily as AI-driven accessibility, as Stewart suggests, then capital flows to platforms and intermediaries. If it is sustainability with generational accountability, as Sherman argues, then long-term infrastructure and food systems become more investable. For small operators, the risk is adopting the definition that happens to be loudest in your feed rather than the one that fits your constraints and capabilities. The cost of chasing novelty, as Shumlas warns against, is not just wasted R&D but eroded trust when customers recognize the gap between your innovation theater and your actual operations.

Watch whether Fast Company's festival audience rewards specificity or retreats to comfortable generality. The test case is Bull: if his N-of-1 philosophy gains traction beyond the startup circuit, it could validate a counter-trend against the platform-scale thinking that has dominated business education for two decades. For operators reading this, the practical move is to write your own one-sentence definition before your next investment decision, then pressure-test whether that spend serves it. The source text is thin on implementation detail, which is itself telling. These founders were asked what innovation means, not how they do it under constraint. The gap between those two questions is where most small businesses actually live.

What to do next: audit your last three major business decisions and tag each with whichever definition above it most closely served. If they are inconsistent or none fit, you are spending without a theory. That is not a failure of innovation. It is a failure of intention, and it is fixable before your next budget cycle.

“Committees produce generic products that excite no one, entrepreneurs create compelling products that inspire obsession.” — Fast Company

Takeaway: Write your own one-sentence innovation definition before your next major spend, then audit whether your decisions actually serve it.