Fast Company’s 11th annual Innovation Festival takes over New York City this September 15–18. Though every year introduces new offerings to the Innovation Festival, we’re also bringing back an attendee favorite: Fast Tracks.
Fast Tracks are our immersive, experience-based sessions that are hosted in the offices and spaces of New York City’s most innovative companies. Think of them as field trips for adults.
From Pickleball at Life Time, to augmented and virtual reality demos at CBS Stations, to a coffee tasting and tour with 787 Coffee, here are a few Fast Tracks you don’t want to miss this year:
Brewing Coffee and Creativity: A Shot of Storytelling
Fast Track hosted by 787 Coffee
Join the team at Puerto Rican coffee company 787 for an in-depth exploration of how your morning cup of joe is transformed from bean to brew. From planting coffee seeds, to roasting a batch of beans, to making your own beverage, you’ll walk away with a deeper understanding of the life cycle of coffee and the stories it can be used to tell—and how that notion applies to your industry.
Peak Performance: From Mindset to Match Point
Fast Track hosted by Life Time
Join Life Time at Penn 1 for an energizing Fast Track experience blending sport and self-optimization. Come ready to listen and play in this interactive session starting with a motivating discussion with Life Time senior vice president Jessie Syfko and Life Time vice president and founder of HPLT Brian Mazza, on how to fuel peak potential through discipline, mindset, and movement. Then grab a paddle (Life Time’s got ’em for you) and hit the court for hands-on pickleball instruction and/or straight up play with Life Time’s elite pros. Come in your workout gear and change after. With full dressing rooms on-site, you’ll be ready to power into the rest of your Innovation Festival day.
From Demos to Deals: How Building an AI Startup in NYC Gets You Closer to Your Customer
Fast Track hosted by The Refinery
As the second-largest startup hub in the world, New York City gives founders a unique edge: faster paths to revenue by building alongside the customers and industry heavyweights who can propel their growth. Join Tech:NYC president and CEO Julie Samuels for a conversation with leading AI entrepreneurs on how the city’s density, diversity, and access to decision-makers turn ideas into partnerships and prototypes into revenue. Following the discussion, Fast Track attendees are invited to network with panelists and fellow guests, enjoy light bites, and take in the waterfront views.
How Oscar Mayer Won the Race to Cultural Relevance and Ignited a New Summer Tradition
Fast Track hosted by Johannes Leonardo
For decades, Oscar Mayer was a household staple that lived on the tip of people’s tongues—quite literally. Everyone could sing an Oscar Mayer jingle (or two), and the brand would spark smiles anywhere the Oscar Mayer Wienermobiles went.
As Oscar Mayer’s core audience matured and its pop-culture presence waned, the iconic Wienermobiles remained beloved. The challenge was clear: spark new brand conversation during the kickoff to grilling season, leveraging a nearly 100-year-old brand asset. The result: the Wienie 500. What began as a one-page idea in a brainstorm quickly evolved into a campaign that made marketing history and the Kraft Heinz record books. Generating more than 6 billion impressions and securing the No. 2 trending hashtag on X, the Wienie 500 took the world by storm, with fans demanding it become an annual tradition.
Featuring speakers from the Oscar Mayer brand and Johannes Leonardo, this session will give attendees a deep dive into how Oscar Mayer and Johannes Leonardo crafted America’s newest obsession and pastime in a way that sparked smiles and spread love for Oscar Mayer hot dogs across the nation.
The Business of Art and Creating a More Inclusive Space
Fast Track hosted by GPGallery
As the art market shifts, a new generation of galleries is embracing a leaner, more intentional approach—prioritizing authentic relationships over volume and aligning economic success with community investment. Join us for a timely conversation between artist and gallerist Jessica Ann Peavy and acclaimed painter Guy Stanley Philoche, hosted at GPGallery (GPG) and exploring how GPG’s hybrid model—merging the artist-centered mission of a nonprofit with the sustainability of a commercial gallery—is creating measurable economic and cultural impact in Harlem. This conversation will unpack how GPG is at the forefront of that movement, offering a real-time case study on how culture and capital can evolve together, from the inside out.
Why We’ve Fallen Out of Love with the Biggest (Beloved) Brands, and How We Fix It
Hosted by Design Bridge & Partners
The same brands that once made us fall in love have somehow fallen into fatigue. In a world where private labels deliver both dupes and desire, and digitally native creator brands are dropping every day, what role do the OGs—the traditional, established brands that built whole categories but are now fighting for differentiation—play today?
Using their proprietary, people-driven brand analysis platform, the top strategists at branding agency Design Bridge and Partners will explore how big brands are becoming a cautionary tale by overly relying on the feelings people already know and love them for. They’ll also demonstrate another way forward, revealing how these tried-and-true OGs can reinvigorate for a new era—tapping the audience to offer additional insights and suggestions before revealing ideas for a revamped brand or two.
Mobilizing Capital to Tackle Climate and Poverty
Fast Track hosted by Acumen
Around the world, the poorest communities are on the front lines of climate change, yet they have the least access to the resources needed to adapt and thrive. In this immersive Fast Track session, founder and CEO Jacqueline Novogratz will share Acumen’s pioneering approach to deploying the right mix of capital to solve the toughest problems at the intersection of climate and poverty, from assembling a $250 million capital stack to bring clean energy to the hardest-to-reach people living without electricity to raising $300 million for agricultural adaptation for smallholder farmers—one of the largest such commitments in the world. Attendees will get to play investor and assess investment opportunities through Acumen’s framework of poverty focus and business viability. This Fast Track will explore what it takes to build systems rooted in dignity and challenge you to rethink investment as a tool for moral as well as economic transformation.
Reworking the Workplace with Ryan Anderson and MillerKnoll
Fast Track hosted by MillerKnoll
Join Ryan Anderson, VP of Global Research and Planning at MillerKnoll, for a new look at today’s workplace. Ryan and the MillerKnoll team are known for rethinking how workspaces can best support people at every stage of their careers. He’ll share insights on how the physical environment can be thoughtfully designed to reduce loneliness and social isolation, while enabling the relationship-based work that’s essential for everyone to create meaningful interactions, from those just starting their careers to those preparing for their final career moves.
Guests will have the opportunity to tour MillerKnoll’s New York showroom (which opened just a year ago), where these ideas come to life. Discover how residential and hospitality-inspired design is making offices feel less institutional, how individual workspaces are evolving to support both focus and social connection, and why thoughtful workplace design is more essential than ever in an era of rising life pressures. Light bites and drinks will follow the session.
Life on the Edge: Stories from the Front Lines of Climate Resilience
Fast Track hosted by Edge of Earth
For three years, the Edges of Earth team has lived and worked in some of the most remote and rapidly changing ecosystems on the planet—above and below the waterline. From disappearing kelp forests to off-grid coastlines and deep jungle research stations, this global expedition set out to document collapse, but more so, to understand resilience.
What they uncovered is called the edge effect—a phenomenon where progress takes root in the margins, led by the people and systems that mainstream climate narratives often overlook.
This session features a screening of their short-form documentary, followed by a conversation and Q&A with expedition lead Andi Cross and special guests who’ve been part of this journey—from subsistence fishers and coral scientists to forest guardians and underwater engineers. Expect raw footage, grounded insights, and a reframing of what it means to make change in a world that often feels too big to fix.
Reimagining Local News: How CBS Stations Uses AR/VR to Tell the Story Within the Story
Fast Track hosted by CBS Stations
Step inside the future of broadcast journalism with CBS New York, where innovation meets impact. In an era when local news is more vital than ever, CBS Stations is leading the charge in transforming how stories are told—leveraging cutting-edge augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) technology to bring viewers deeper into the “why” behind the weather, elections, and major breaking news. This immersive session offers a behind-the-scenes look at how CBS New York is redefining the traditional newscast. Attendees will meet the journalists and technologists driving this evolution, explore interactive demonstrations of AR/VR storytelling, and tour the legendary CBS Broadcast Center. From dynamic weather visualizations to real-time election data rendered in 3D, discover how CBS is making news more engaging, informative, and future-ready.
How Designing for Queer Audiences Fuels Unique Innovation
Fast Track hosted by Local Projects
Amid growing political and cultural headwinds, LGBTQ+ communities continue to shape culture through bold self-expression, mutual care, and creative resistance. Designing for queer audiences today isn’t just about inclusion—it’s about unlocking new ways of thinking, building, and belonging.
Join Local Projects, the Fast Company award-winning experience designer of the new Stonewall National Monument Visitor Center, for a short tour of the exhibition with the founders. Following the tour, visitors will hear from a panel of LGBTQ+ entrepreneurs at the forefront of inclusive design, curated and moderated by communications agency Camron. Panelists will share personal stories and lessons learned from building for—and within—queer communities.
