The Innovative Leader of the Year category of Best Workplaces for Innovators honors individuals at any level, from CEO to department head, who have enhanced the innovation culture of their workplace.

Winner: Sarah Russell, Director, Bellwether, X, the Moonshot Factory

Mountain View, CA

In 2019, as an entrepreneur in residence at Alphabet’s X, the Moonshot Factory, Sarah Russell created Bellwether, which harnesses AI and data to assess natural disaster risk and mitigate impact on communities. Bellwether forecasts probabilities for severe weather, provides aerial images to first responders, and helps insurers understand disaster risk. When Hurricane Helene struck last September, the tool processed 75,000 images from Civil Air Patrol in a matter of minutes rather than days. Russell is also a practicing emergency room physician and an assistant professor at Stanford’s School of Medicine, and she was captain of the 1998 Harvard women’s basketball team that upset Stanford to become the first March Madness 16 seed to topple a 1 seed.

Finalists:

Andrew Heifetz, CEO, Ampsight (acquired in May 2025 by Vibrint, where Heifetz is now chief strategy officer), Sterling, VA

As CEO of Ampsight, Heifetz launched “AmpArena” innovation competitions so that cross-functional teams can test emerging technologies, stress-test internal tools, and propose new solutions outside of their daily responsibilities.

Ely Greenfield, chief technology officer, digital media, Adobe, San Jose

Greenfield has overseen the development of Firefly, Adobe’s generative AI model that has been used to generate more than 20 billion assets around the globe. He champions an iterative, experimentation-driven mindset within Adobe like Adobe’s Sneaks program, which previews early-stage innovations born from employee ideas and passion projects.