The United States of Innovation: 13 Stories of American Ingenuity

America runs on innovation. (Sorry, Dunkin’.) As Americans celebrate the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, Fast Company has compiled a compelling collection of stories throughout our history—a mere 31 years—to inspire you and your greatness. Our journey starts on the launchpad of a space flight and the Herculean, mission-critical software that underpins its success. From there, we climb aboard a warship docked in San Diego for a naval commander’s leadership class, listen in on Steve Jobs in his living room, and marvel at how a former manufacturer of wire baskets for bagel shops reinvented itself as a precision manufacturer. Then you’ll be transported to Disney World, where you’ll see the corporate infighting it sometimes takes to make magic. And you’ll visit a 20,000 house that you’ll wish you lived in. Before we’re through, we’ll redesign overlooked objects from the vegetable peeler to the “I Voted” sticker; engineer the feat of YouTube stardom with Mark Rober; visit Google DeepMind leader Demis Hassabis and Reddit in the age of AI Hassabis helped create; rethink capitalism; and return to space to consider how our orbital ambitions impact on our lives on Earth. How’s that for an action-packed holiday weekend filled with adventure . . . that also just happens to make you smarter about how to innovate? Let’s go! Space flight seems like a hardware problem, but it’s really a software challenge. And that software has to be as perfect as any software can be—and it is. “Consider these stats: The last three versions of the program [that powered the Space Shuttle]—each 420,000 lines long—had just one error each.” This quest for perfection has inspired multiple generations of engineers, and it’ll inspire you too. Commander Abrashoff upends every preconceived notion of military leadership, promoting a bottom-up philosophy that blends innovative practices with empowered individuals to produce outsized results. After all, as he tells Polly Labarre: “The most important thing that a captain can do is to see the ship from the eyes of the crew.” Longtime tech reporter Brent Schlender discovered 25 years of recorded interviews with Steve Jobs in his storage shed after Jobs’s death in 2011. Relistening to these extended conversations, he realizes that the narrative about Jobs’s years away from Apple—1985 to 1996—is all wrong. He had captured the Apple cofounder’s maturation into the CEO he’d become during his second stint at the company. “We were the King of the Bagel Baskets,” Marlin Steel’s Drew Greenblatt tells Charles Fishman. Then Chinese manufacturers undercut him on price, and Greenblatt had a choice: innovate or die. We hear a lot about bringing back American manufacturing, but we don’t hear about how we’re going to do that. Marlin’s tale of transformation from selling a commodity to being a specialty maker of wire baskets is that story. “This is what happens when a huge corporation tries to reinvent itself” declares the writer Austin Carr in setting up his epic tale of Disney’s development of its groundbreaking digital experience for its theme parks. Today, the Disney parks are the entertainment conglomerate’s growth and profit engines, and in many ways, that started with this massive project that is a “tale of corporate politics, personal feuds, and turf wars,” Carr writes. “But it’s also the story of a success.” As the U.S. continues to grapple with a housing crisis, what better time to revisit this stunning story from a decade ago that offers a vision of the future that it’s not too late to reclaim? As Adele Peters explains, these low-cost homes are a design triumph, and they challenged every construction, permitting, and zoning norm. “They’re built more like airplanes than houses,” says Rusty Smith, associate director of Rural Studio, which designed them. Are you hooked? How did the humble vegetable peeler become a timeless industrial design icon? Mark Wilson takes readers inside the design details and surprising history that made the OXO Swivel a legendary product. In the 50 days leading up to the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing in 2019, Charles Fishman wrote a story each day, revealing fascinating elements of the massive initiative to go from President Kennedy’s 1961 declaration to achieving that seemingly impossible goal. The conventional wisdom, to this day, is that because we didn’t get space cities and interplanetary life, we somehow failed. But Fishman bucks that idea, drawing a straight line from the effort to the digital world in which we now live. In this revealing conversation between Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard and Fast Company‘s Jeff Beer, Chouinard, then 81, is by turns insightful, funny, and stoic about what it means to run a capitalist enterprise when you’re trying to save the planet. “It’s a never-ending summit. You’re just climbing forever,” he says. “You’ll never get to the top, but it’s the journey.” This energetic, propulsive Devin Gordon profile of the popular YouTube science creator Mark Rober matches its subject in its enthusiasm and mischievous spirit. “My whole business is making engineering simple and fun,” he says. But he also has a secret: The key to doing that is not being an elite engineer; it’s being a great storyteller. What if the answer to more Americans participating in the democratic process of voting for their elected representatives was a better reward after they’ve done their civic duty? During the last midterms election cycle, Fast Company asked a half-dozen design firms to make a better sticker to signify you’ve voted, and the results are . . . amazing. Reddit is the internet’s almost-20-year overnight success story. As Harry McCracken chronicles, the chaotic, freewheeling home for online discussion of more than 100,000 topics has also become a bastion of humanity—and maybe the last one on the internet—in the AI age. As the agentic web takes hold, the principles laid out here of how to keep alive what made the internet a phenomenon of connection and community in the first place are only more resonant. This profile of Google DeepMind’s leader Demis Hassabis captures him at a critical juncture in his career as an AI researcher. “For years, he has been motivated by AI’s potential to solve some of humanity’s biggest challenges, a vision Google shared and allowed him to pursue with great autonomy,” Harry McCracken writes. “But now he must square that aim with the growing pressure to pump out new technologies that will keep Google’s biggest products relevant.” It’s a balancing act that never ends, and the future of AI—and Google—depends on it.