"We need more young women starting companies," Soraya Darabi told me last month, and after sharing onstage and offstage conversations with her, Ray Kurzweil, Jesse Dylan, and Scott Belsky at our Most Creative People event, I left convinced that she was on the brink of her next step.

What is a sustainable innovation? I had the pleasure of representing Fast Company among judges from Nike and IDEO at the Sustainable Brands Conference's second annual Innovation Open in Monterey, CA this week, and we had a lively discussion on that topic.