The Super Innovators … 10 radical ways to disrupt conventions, embrace deeper insights, unlock valuable assets, and stretch innovation for more dramatic impact … time to reinvent the future, and yourself

September 3, 2025

Innovation has become surprisingly conventional.

Most companies are locked into group think, short-termism, blinkered perspectives and risk aversion. When innovation should be the rocket fuel of reinvention, it becomes the habit of incrementalism.

In an age of AI disruption, climate urgency, shifting geopolitics, and cultural upheaval, businesses that stand still are quickly left behind. Incremental improvements — shaving a few costs here, adding a product feature there, a tweak to the business model — may keep companies alive, but they won’t secure a bold future.

The leaders who thrive in today’s dynamic environment are embracing what I would call “super innovation”.

This is not “innovation as usual” but something more radical, ambitious, rapid and transformative. It’s about stretching creativity to its limits, imagining new markets, and reinventing entire industries. It is driven by the power of futures thinking, exponential technologies, creative imagination, platform ecosystems, and boundary-breaking collaboration.

Here are 10 radical, stretching, and exciting ways leaders and their companies can embrace hyper innovation — with inspiration from pioneers who are already showing the way.

1. Think future-back

Most corporate strategies extend today’s market trends into tomorrow, which usually means they fight the old fires, rather than exploring new possibilities. They become limited, distracted and incremental. Super innovators do the opposite: they start with a vision of the future they seek, and work backward to design the business that will thrive there.

Inspiration: Waymo is not designing cars for today’s drivers but imagining a future of autonomous mobility — where safety, accessibility, and shared services redefine transportation – and was recently ranked the world’s most innovative company. DBS Bank, Singapore’s financial giant, adopted a “future-back” model when it reinvented itself as a tech company with a banking license, embedding AI, digital ecosystems, and sustainability into its DNA. Google X‘s moonshot mindset, thinking 10x not 10% is also a future back mindset. Jumping to the impossible, then finding how to make it happen, leapfrogging convention and escaping the quagmire of today.

Lesson: Imagine your business in 2035, in a climate-conscious, AI-native, borderless economy. Then ask: what do we need to invent now to thrive there? Then work backwards, to map out how you could get there – not in 10 years, but much faster.

2. Harness exponential technologies

Innovation becomes revolutionary when technologies converge. AI on its own is powerful; combined with robotics, genomics, quantum computing, and nanomaterials, it reshapes entire industries. The impact becomes multiplying, particular when it harnesses network effects of one sort or another, be they marketing flywheels, social collaborations or more.

Inspiration: Illumina sits at the heart of the genomics revolution, driving down the cost of DNA sequencing and enabling breakthroughs in personalized medicine. Nvidia, once a graphics chip maker, has become the engine of the AI age by combining GPU architecture with machine learning and cloud ecosystems. Together, they show how combining exponential technologies can create whole new industries.

Lesson: Don’t just chase a single trend. Ask what intersections of technologies can we orchestrate to create industries of the future? How can we build network effects into our business model? How can we multiply the impact?

3. AI as your co-creator

AI is not just a tool for efficiency — it’s a collaborative partner that sparks ideas, accelerates design, and reveals unexpected pathways. This might be in the creative process, by opening up thinking in novel and rapid ways, or in testing and evaluation again many times faster than normal, but most significantly as a core of the new solution or its business model.

Inspiration: Insilico Medicine uses AI to imagine novel drug compounds, cutting R&D timelines from years to months. L’Oréal applies AI to co-create with customers — from personalized beauty diagnostics to virtual try-on experiences. Hermès, though rooted in craft, experiments with AI in materials science to explore sustainable leathers, proving that even luxury houses can partner with technology.

Lesson: Treat AI as a partner in creativity — not just an optimizer, but a co-designer of future possibilities – and then in a transformational enabler of the new product, service, business model or more. This is where AI has real added value.

4. Create platform ecosystems

Innovators are notorious for their product centricity. The bright shiny object syndrome. Products still dominate design and development thinking because they are tangible. Customer-centricity, services, experiences, business models are a step forwards. Super innovation is about building ecosystems of value — platforms that empower others to innovate, collaborate, and scale.

Inspiration: Mercado Libre has become Latin America’s innovation powerhouse by building a platform spanning e-commerce, logistics, digital payments, and credit. BYD, meanwhile, has built an ecosystem that integrates cars, batteries, and solar energy, creating circular loops of value that extend beyond vehicles. Nvidia has similarly created an ecosystem of developers, startups, and researchers who build on its GPU platforms.

Lesson: Products have limits; platforms expand infinitely. Ask what ecosystem could we build that lets others innovate with us? What could partners better than us, so we don’t need to do it ourselves? Faster, cheaper, at less risk, with more agility?

5. Play in new marketspaces

The most radical innovators don’t just fight for share in existing markets, they create entirely new ones. When Dietmar Mateshitz created Red Bull he didn’t seeking to compete with Coke and Pepsi, but instead to create a new space, energy drinks. Think blue oceans rather than red oceans. Hybrid spaces like super apps. Layered spaces like ingredient brands.

Inspiration: Danone reframed its mission from selling dairy products to leading in “One Planet. One Health,” turning food into a driver of social and environmental change. Waymo is not competing with traditional carmakers but inventing a new market around autonomous mobility services. Revolut isn’t playing in traditional banking but creating a borderless, digital-first financial category.

Lesson: Don’t ask how do we compete in our market, instead ask what new spaces can we invent where we define the rules. Apply innovation to the market itself, not just to your business. This could be in terms of language, customer behaviours, education, price points, regulation, channels, and more. Shape the market to your advantage, then promote, protect and own it!

6. Build creative collisions

Leonardo da Vinci defined innovation as making unusual connections. As a polymath he was able to flow between different thinking – an artist, sculpture, mechanic and more. Breakthrough ideas emerge at the edges, where different disciplines and perspectives collide.

Inspiration: IDEO pioneered human-centered design by mixing engineers, artists, and psychologists. Hermès thrives on collisions between heritage artisans and avant-garde designers, blending timeless craftsmanship with digital experimentation. Illumina collaborates with healthcare providers, tech companies, and governments to fuse biology, AI, and policy. Liquid Death is fresh spring water, but marketed like heavy rock music.

Lesson: Engineer creative collisions in your culture. Invite outsiders in, mix disciplines, and create hybrid teams that spark fresh thinking. The connections may not seem obvious at first, because they are unusual. So they need work, creativity to explore the possibilities of fusion, and practical ways to exploit it, practically and profitably.

7. Shift from products to impact

Most innovation still focuses on products, but with the least value impact. It is functional and blinkered. it focuses on transactional benefits. Super innovation is not just about creating things but about changing lives and driving impact. It is about understanding the real problem to solve, job to be done, dream to achieve. The real purpose could be individual, commercial, societal, or more. Purpose accelerates creativity and builds loyalty.

Inspiration: Patagonia uses innovation to fight climate change. Schneider Electric reframes its mission around decarbonization and energy efficiency. Danone anchors its transformation in health and sustainability. DBS Bank ties innovation directly to social outcomes, from digital inclusion to green finance.

Lesson: Innovation without impact is just novelty. Start with the customers bigger problem, the stretching ambition, and how you could innovate to address this. Anchor your breakthroughs to purposeful transformation.

8. Prototype at the speed of culture

Innovation is about connecting with, capturing and shaping, the culture of today and tomorrow. To be relevant, to be cool, to be desired, means having cultural alignment. And yet the cultural landscape shifts daily. Super innovators prototype fast, in real time, with real users. They connect their ideas, with brands, with people, with culture.

Inspiration: ByteDance (TikTok) is the ultimate cultural prototyper, testing thousands of features daily. Nio applies the same mindset to mobility, rolling out subscription and community-driven services at speed. Insilico runs thousands of AI-generated simulations, effectively prototyping drugs in silico before ever testing in labs.

Lesson: Don’t wait for perfect. Prototype in culture and context, and refine based on live feedback. Experimentation enables you to rapidly discovered what works and doesn’t, what’s liked and what’s not. It is hard, in the practical sense of functionality, but it is also soft, about emotional resonance.

9. Partner with unlikely partners

Partners take you outside of your comfort zone. Beyond your industry, your conventions, your accepted possibilities. They open up a new sphere of possibility, do connect products and services in new ways, to engage customers who would not normally consider you, to give you new capabilities and power. Super innovators cross boundaries and collaborate with unexpected partners, even competitors.

Inspiration: Unilever works with NGOs and startups to accelerate sustainability. L’Oréal partners with AR/VR tech companies to reinvent beauty. Waymo collaborates with city planners, regulators, and automakers to make autonomous mobility viable. Hermès has even collaborated with Apple (on watch straps) — showing that heritage and tech can be unlikely but powerful allies.

Lesson: Ask who outside our world could 10x our innovation if we joined forces? Who could take me further, and in new directions, add new services, reach new audiences, add more value?

10. Reinvent yourself relentlessly

The ultimate super innovation is the ability to reinvent your company again and again. And yourself – your mind, your experiences, your skills. Yesterday’s success is often tomorrow’s trap.

Inspiration: Nintendo transformed from cards to gaming. DBS Bank shifted from bureaucracy to digital pioneer. Nvidia reinvented itself from a niche graphics chipmaker to the defining company of the AI era. BYD evolved from a battery maker into a global EV leader. These are all examples of relentless business reinvention, riding the S curves of changing markets, changing before you have to, and embracing change as your opportunity.

Lesson: Treat reinvention as a permanent state — a permanent beta –  not a one-off reaction to disruption. This means that rethinking is relentless, transformation is a continuous journey, and innovation needs to go beyond the normal – to be super.

Who are the super innovators?

These 10 innovators exemplify bold thinking, creativity, and transformative impact across industries, from technology and finance to healthcare, sustainability, and consumer goods:

  • Silvio Campara, CEO of Golden Goose, has reimagined the luxury fashion experience by empowering customers to co-create their sneakers. This direct-to-consumer approach, combined with an emphasis on personalized experiences, has not only driven revenue growth but also positioned Golden Goose as a pioneer in interactive luxury retail.
  • Lucy Guo, co-founder of Scale AI, leveraged her early entrepreneurial instincts to dominate the AI data-labeling space. Her work accelerates AI applications across industries, demonstrating the power of combining technical acumen with bold business strategy.
  • Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, has been instrumental in advancing graphics processing and AI technology. Under his leadership, Nvidia has transformed from a hardware company into a central pillar of the AI revolution, enabling breakthroughs in machine learning, autonomous vehicles, and scientific computing.
  • Inna Braverman of Eco Wave Power is pioneering renewable energy solutions. Her patented wave-energy technology demonstrates that innovative approaches to sustainability can create both environmental impact and commercial success, exemplifying purpose-driven entrepreneurship.
  • Fei-Fei Li, CEO of World Labs, has expanded the practical applications of AI, making complex technologies more accessible and ethical. Her work bridges academia, industry, and society, highlighting the role of thoughtful innovation in shaping the future of technology.
  • Ranjit Kapila, leading Parametric, has revolutionized investment strategies through direct indexing. By offering personalized, data-driven solutions, Kapila is reshaping the financial services industry and demonstrating how innovation can create value for both clients and markets.
  • Anna-Lisa Miller, at Ownership Works, champions employee shareholding. Her focus on wealth distribution and organizational engagement has transformed corporate culture, proving that innovation is not limited to products—it also extends to governance and ownership structures.
  • Arthur Sadoun, CEO of Publicis Groupe, has integrated AI and data-driven marketing strategies to reinvent advertising in the digital age. His leadership underscores how established industries can evolve through strategic adoption of technology and creative problem-solving.
  • Marin Gjaja, leading Ford Model e, has driven innovation in the automotive sector, particularly in electric vehicles. His initiatives position Ford as a competitive player in the EV market, blending traditional manufacturing expertise with cutting-edge sustainability technologies.
  • Prathibha Varkey at Mayo Clinic Health System exemplifies innovation in healthcare. By implementing technology-driven solutions to improve patient care and operational efficiency, Varkey demonstrates how thoughtful innovation can address complex societal challenges while enhancing organizational performance.

These 10 leaders illustrate that innovation is multidimensional—it encompasses product design, technology, business models, sustainability, organizational culture, and societal impact. What unites them is a willingness to challenge conventional thinking, leverage emerging technologies, and create solutions that not only drive business success but also positively influence society. They are the blueprint for the next generation of innovators: bold, visionary, and relentlessly focused on shaping the future.

The super innovator mindset

Super innovation is not a toolkit — it’s a mindset. It means stretching beyond the obvious, embracing ambiguity, and daring to imagine futures others cannot yet see.

What unites pioneers like Jony Ive and Lei Jun, Lucy Guo and Lei-Fei Li, or the founders of companies like Waymo, Illumina, or Nvidia is not just what they invented but how they thought: future-back, impact-first, tech-enabled, and endlessly curious. They didn’t wait for markets to shift; they created the shift.

The challenge to today’s leaders is clear: don’t just innovate within your category. Super innovate across boundaries.Don’t just adapt to the future. Invent it.

The future belongs to those bold enough to stretch imagination, and courageous enough to turn those ideas into action.

What will you do?

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