Jill Bernstein

In honor of Fast Company’s 10th Innovation Festival next week, we identified the industrious leaders whose groundbreaking efforts defined the past decade in business. We spoke to them about their extraordinary achievements in tech, medicine, entertainment, and more. And we explored how the impact of their work has withstood passing fads, various presidential administrations, a pandemic, and many, many quarterly reports. These are the 10 most innovative people of the last 10 years.

When Hamilton debuted off Broadway in 2015, telling America’s founding story through the language of hip-hop, it became a sensation, immediately yanking the American songbook into the 21st century. The show went on to earn nearly $1 billion in Broadway ticket sales, won a Pulitzer Prize, and generated a media universe spanning book publishing, music—the album has sold more than 10 million copies—and streaming; the TV debut essentially launched Disney+.

I’m Todd L. Burns, and welcome to Music Journalism Insider, a newsletter about music journalism. Click here to subscribe! P. Claire Dodson is the senior entertainment editor at Teen Vogue and a freelance journalist who has written for the New York Times, Fast Company, and more. How did you get to where you are today, professionally? In the early 2000s, my dad took me to a Britney Spears concert that he was reviewing for our small community newspaper in East Tennessee.