The Tribeca Film Festival (TFF) has announced the honorees for its sixth annual Disruptive Innovation Awards, held in collaboration with Harvard Business School professor Clay Christensen and the Disruptor Foundation. Co-sponsored by Accenture and AT&T, the awards will be moderated by Perri Peltz at the Tribeca Performing Arts Center BMCC, on Friday April 24, at 11 am. The Tribeca Film Festival runs from April 15-26.
Inspired by Christensen’s ground-breaking theory of disruptive innovation, the Tribeca Disruptive Innovation Awards celebrate innovators who have broken the mold to significantly impact industries and business models in traditional and non-traditional domains including sports, media, healthcare, social justice, education, politics and entertainment. The awards highlight projects and ideas at the intersection of technology and culture and seek to identify anomalies and outliers. Over the past six years, the awards have predicted notable innovators early in their existence including Jack Dorsey for Square (2010), Garrett Camp for Uber (2013), DARPA’s drone Hummingbird (2012), Psy’s YouTube record-breaking views for “Gangnam Style” (2013), and Scooter Braun’s SB Management for cultivating artists including Justin Bieber (2012).
The 2015 honorees include Airbnb, the trusted community marketplace for people to list, discover, and book unique accommodations around the world–online or from a mobile phone; Shane Smith, founder and CEO of global youth media brand VICE, critically-acclaimed journalist, host and producer, and one of the industry’s most respected visionaries; Jake Burton, founder of Burton Snowboards, a company that has played a pivotal role in growing snowboarding from a backyard hobby to a world-class sport; Rent The Runway, a fashion company with a technology soul that is disrupting the way women get dressed; and Girls Who Code, a national non-profit organization working to close the gender gap in technology and prepare young women for jobs of the future.
Among other award recipients include Peter Greste, acclaimed Australian journalist and Peabody Award winner who was recently released after 13 months of wrongful political imprisonment in Egypt for his coverage for Al Jazeera English; Darren Walker, president of the Ford Foundation who oversees more than $12 billion in assets, including $500 million annually in global social justice grants; and Formula E Racing, a new FIA single-seater championship and the world’s first fully-electric racing series. Additional honorees include Jason Silva, Advance Care Planning at Gundersen Health Systems, Peek.com’s Ruzwana Bashir, Bloomberg News reporter Mary Childs, wheelchair moto-cross athlete Aaron “Wheelz” Fotheringham, Brad Katsuyama of IEX, littleBits, the David Lynch Foundation, Operation Smile’s Dr. Bill Magee, Georgette Mulheir of Lumos, Alec Momont of Drones for Good, Nanotronics Imaging, Alyse Nelson of Vital Voices, Scribd, Tampon Run, and HIV researcher Nicole Ticea.
The 2015 Book of the Year is “The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution” (Simon & Schuster, 2014) by New York Times bestselling author Walter Isaacson: a revealing story of the people who created the computer and the Internet.
The 2015 App of the Year is Headspace, a subscription-based app delivering 10-minute meditation sessions and providing activity tracking, reminders, tips and animations about how the mind works.
“We are thrilled to be celebrating with Clay these remarkable innovators who are on the frontiers of disruptive innovation theory implementing new business models with stunning success—many of which are anomalies that the original theory did not predict,” said Craig Hatkoff, TFF co-founder and chief curator for the Disruptive Innovation Awards.
Honorees receive the iconic red hammer as the official trophy that embodies the spirit of the awards–in the spirit of psychologist Abe Maslow who in his famous quote said, “when your only tool is a hammer, every problem starts looking like a nail.”
