Fast Company’s fifth annual Best Workplaces for Innovators list promises to be more comprehensive than ever, offering eight brand-new categories. Here are six reasons why you should apply.
1. Brand exposure. Every company selected as a finalist will be featured in the summer issue of the magazine and on fastcompany.com (receiving more than 12 million monthly unique visitors and more than 40 million page views).
2. Talent retention. Public recognition as a Best Workplace for Innovators honoree will provide powerful third-party validation and enhance your ability to recruit and retain top talent.
3. Editorial access. Fast Company editors will review all applications; the application represents an opportunity to highlight individuals and projects that showcase your company’s innovative prowess.
4. Credibility. Fast Company’s reputation for writing about innovation is unparalleled in business media. Inclusion on the list is a powerful stamp of approval of your company’s efforts.
5. Employee recognition. The program honors an Innovation Team of the Year as wells as an Innovation Leader of the Year, along with finalists in each category.
6. Expanded opportunities for recognition. In addition to previous years’ categories, this year’s Best Workplaces for Innovators will celebrate companies operating in a wide range of sectors, including finance, health, and social good. Another new category will recognize companies that have achieved sustained excellence over the years as incubators for talented innovators.
For more than a decade, Fast Company has been recognizing outstanding achievement in business innovation with its annual awards programs. In addition to Best Workplaces for Innovators, Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies, Innovation by Design, World Changing Ideas, Brands That Matter, and the Next Big Thing in Tech lists have celebrated thousands of organizations transforming industries and shaping society through paradigm-shifting products, insights, or services.
What differentiates Best Workplaces for Innovators from existing best-places-to-work lists is that it goes beyond benefits, competitive compensation, and collegiality (mere table stakes in today’s brutally competitive talent marketplace) to identify which companies are actively creating and sustaining the kinds of innovative cultures that many top employees value even more than money. Places where they can do the best work of their careers and improve the lives of hundreds, thousands, even millions of people around the world.
To compile this ranking, the editors of Fast Company are collaborating with Accenture, the global professional services firm that brings decades of research and expertise on relevant topics, from corporate innovation to workplace inclusion. Every company that applies is assessed twice—once by Fast Company editors and separately by Accenture researchers—after which the results are merged and finalists are presented to a panel of outside judges, all of them experts on business innovation.
Best Workplaces for Innovators is the most authoritative list of companies cultivating an organization-wide commitment to innovation. We hope you’ll submit your company today.
For more information on applying, see the FAQs. But don’t delay too long—the deadline is February 10.
Recognize your brand’s excellence by applying to this year’s Brands That Matter Awards before the early-rate deadline, May 3.
