Better Together: How Four Companies Are Rewriting the Rules of Corporate Innovation

Starting From the Inside Out

Before any of these companies could change their communities, they had to change themselves—or at least how they worked.

When Rosita Najmi joined Micron as Global Head of Social Impact and Community Engagement in late 2024, her mandate was clear: increase scale, strengthen impact measurement, and align the company’s social impact and community engagement portfolio with the business. Since Micron is building the memory technologies that power AI, that meant the philanthropic work needed to be AI-forward too. What followed was a ground-up rebuild—a model Najmi calls a “holistic AI adoption” approach organized around three connected levers: people, process, and philanthropy.

The team started with themselves. The Social Impact and Community Engagement team built AI fluency through internal assessments, hackathons, and ongoing training sessions. They rotate who leads a digital fluency learning segment at monthly all-hands meetings. “Upskilling our team through this structured learning approach engaged team members where they were,” Najmi explains. Then they applied that same logic outward: team members became AI mentors in their communities, creating two-way learning loops—employees deepen their own skills through teaching, and community members gain real-world AI guidance they wouldn’t otherwise have.

The most ambitious test of that model came through Micron’s Community Impact Grants (CIG) program. Rather than managing grantmaking through fragmented site-by-site processes, which had relied on manual scoring and inconsistent criteria – Micron developed a purpose-built agentic AI program to evaluate nonprofit nominations against a five-criterion scorecard. The agent didn’t replace human judgement; it handled 90 percent of the scoring work, freeing 16 site-based Governance Committees –composed of 239 employees across the globe – to focus their time and deliberation on final grant selection. For the first time, any Micron employee could nominate a local nonprofit, and 407 of them did, producing a portfolio of 52 grantees backed by $2.5 million. The majority of the finalists had no prior relationship with Micron – evidence that participatory grantmaking, when structured with AI, can expand a company’s community engagement and network.

Citizens followed a similar inside-out logic when it set out to close a persistent workforce gap in Rhode Island’s banking sector. A market analysis conducted with community college partner CCRI and nonprofit Education Design Lab, a national nonprofit that co-designs skills-based, learn-and-work systems (including micro-pathways), revealed a telling disconnect: the state’s banking industry was projected to add roughly 500 new roles over five years, many of them shaped by AI and digital transformation—yet traditional education pathways were too long, too costly, and too disconnected from actual hiring needs to move talent into those roles quickly. To address this gap holistically, Citizens and its partners convened more than 10 institutions across education, workforce development, and industry to align on solutions. So, Citizens designed the Banking Micropathway, a skills-first, employer-validated, accelerated credential program at CCRI. The goal, as Citizens describes it, was “not just to fill roles, but to expand economic opportunity and build a more inclusive, future-ready workforce pipeline.”

For Con Edison, getting started on a new CSR program also meant rethinking some of the old ways of doing things. Nearly half the communities the utility serves are state-designated disadvantaged communities—neighborhoods bearing a disproportionate share of climate risk from extreme heat and flooding, while having the fewest resources to adapt. Conventional grantmaking, Con Edison recognized, wasn’t built for a problem this layered and complex. So, the company launched the Climate Resilience Coalition: not a grant program in the conventional sense, but a cohort model designed to fund, convene, and connect trusted community-based organizations across its service territory.

For Novo Nordisk, the inside-out reckoning was strategic. In 2022, the company made a deliberate decision to focus its social impact work on lifting community health outcomes—starting with food and nutrition. The logic was straightforward: improve access to healthy food, and you improve health. But the data told a more complicated story. Food access moved the needle, but not enough. Obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease are shaped by the full arc of how people live: whether they have stable housing, access to quality care, safe places to be active, and pathways to economic security.

That recognition forced a harder question: who else needed to be at the table? Novo Nordisk was candid with itself—it had neither the reach nor the expertise to tackle housing, transportation, workforce development, and healthcare access on its own. The Interrupt was built around that reality: not a corporate program, but a cross-sector platform designed to bring in partners with capabilities Novo Nordisk didn't have, aligned around a shared commitment to whole-health outcomes.

Turning Competitors into Co-Investors and Grantees into Partners

Among the most striking things these programs share is a willingness to explore who belongs at the table—and what role the company should play once everyone is seated.

For Citizens, that meant convening rival institutions. Working through the Rhode Island Bankers Association, Citizens brought together Bank of America, BankNewport, Centreville Bank and Washington Trust around a shared problem: the workforce challenge was bigger than any one bank could solve. Those competitors became co-investors, pooling resources to make the Banking Micropathway tuition-free for Rhode Island residents. Ten banking institutions ultimately participated in hiring events. The first cohort of ten graduates produced three full-time hires within a month.

Citizens is candid about what made this shift possible—and what made it hard. “The biggest shift was moving from competition to collective impact,” the team writes. “What made it successful was a shared understanding that the workforce challenge was bigger than any one institution.” That shift didn’t happen automatically. It required building trust quickly, aligning different institutional timelines, and keeping both employers and learners at the center of every design decision.

Con Edison faced a different version of the same challenge. Rather than convening competitors, the company had to rethink its relationship with the community organizations it funds. The Climate Resilience Coalition selected six nonprofit partners from 49 open proposals—The Point CDC, New York Disaster Interfaith Services, Nonprofit Staten Island, Groundwork Hudson Valley & Hudson River Museum, Nos Quedamos, and UPROSE—and deliberately organized them as a cohort rather than as isolated grantees. “Rather than funding isolated projects, we intentionally built a cohort model focused on collaboration, shared learning, and long-term partnership,” Con Edison explains. That distinction matters, because while individual grantees may or may not derive big-picture takeaways on their own, a communicative cohort often will.

Novo Nordisk’s The Interrupt faced a similar coalition co-ordination challenge, at a different scale. The Interrupt is a cross-sector platform designed to address chronic disease—obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease—through integrated, whole-health interventions rather than the single-factor approaches that have historically produced “siloed and fragmented strategies.” Its founding partners span Novo Nordisk, Bank of America, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation, the J. Willard and Alice S. Marriott Foundation, and Esri—alongside dozens of community organizations. What holds the coalition collective together, Novo Nordisk emphasizes, is that each partner continues to invest in work that fits its own social impact strategy. “Flexibility is not a concession—it is the architecture.”

Community Trust is Built Slowly and Lost Quickly

If there is one lesson that runs through every 2026 program winner, it is this: the hardest part of innovative CSR isn’t the technology, the funding, or even the politics of getting competitors to collaborate. It’s earning—and keeping—community trust.

Novo Nordisk states the case plainly. “Community trust is not given—it is built slowly and lost quickly.” The Interrupt’s work in Washington, D.C., illustrates their point. Rather than arriving with a branded corporate program, The Interrupt partnered with trusted local organizations—Building Bridges Across the River and Black Nurses Rock DMV—and deliberately built a ground-level brand that residents could recognize as their own. At Washington View, a 3,000-person community in Ward 8, where nearly 20 percent of residents have diabetes, and where a single grocery store serves 75,000 people, residents helped name the local initiative “View Strong.” The result has been over 6,000 pounds of food distributed, living-wage career connections, health screenings, and a programming ecosystem that residents experience as integrated—not as a series of disconnected corporate gifts.

Con Edison arrived at the same conclusion through a different path. As the Climate Resilience Coalition evolved, the company found that communities wanted more than funding; they wanted a genuine relationship with the utility itself. “Trust-building cannot be transactional,” Con Edison writes. That recognition pushed the company to evolve its role from grant maker to convenor: organizing listening sessions between grantee organizations and Con Edison’s Environmental Justice Working Group, hosting site visits that connected internal business units directly with local leaders and residents, and inviting community partners to speak at internal town halls. When The Point CDC was asked to address Con Edison’s Corporate Affairs team about conditions in underserved Bronx neighborhoods, that wasn’t a PR gesture—it was an accountability mechanism.

Micron’s coalition work took a different form, but the trust-building logic was consistent. Rather than traditional top-down philanthropic structures, Micron used skills-based volunteering and experiential learning as mechanisms for building community relationships. “These shared learning experiences created much stronger, more durable relationships across community organizations and team members,” Najmi notes.

The Hard Part is Change Management, Not Technology

Each of this year’s winners offered candid insights on what didn’t go according to plan.

For Micron, the revelation was about change management. “The hardest part is not technology—it is change management,” Najmi says. Building AI fluency required ongoing skill development; integrating AI into business processes required restructured data and workflows; and earning buy-in from people across the organization required time and leadership commitment for which no technical solution could substitute. The technology, she notes, is “the easy part.” AI only works if the humans in the loop are bought-in and the underlying processes and data are ready for it.

Citizens echoes the point from a workforce design perspective. Aligning multiple institutions with different priorities, timelines, and processes around a shared purpose required trust-building that couldn’t be rushed. Designing an accessible program for working adults meant continuous iteration on format, pacing, and support. The lessons Citizens draws: invest early in trust and alignment, keep employers and learners at the center, stay flexible, and plan carefully around academic and operational timelines.

Con Edison’s lesson was about scope and pace. “Strong community partnerships require more time, coordination, and relationship-building than traditional grant programs,” the team reflects. Each of the six coalition partners operates within a different local context, with unique priorities and pressures—which meant that aligning goals across the cohort required ongoing dialogue, not a one-time planning meeting. The program’s evolution from grant maker to convenor wasn’t the original plan; it emerged from listening.

Novo Nordisk makes the same observation about partner motivation. “Good intentions are not enough to bring partners to the table. Organizations join collaborative efforts when they can see the benefit to their own mission, not just yours.” The Interrupt was designed with that reality in mind from the start, which is part of why it has been able to sustain and expand its partnerships.

Leadership Makes the Difference

Each winner also points—sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly—to the role of leadership in making ambitious CSR work possible.

At Micron, the structural alignment is unusually tight: the Foundation’s board chair is the company’s CEO, and the Chief People Officer serves both as president of the corporate foundation and as one of the executives responsible for AI adoption company wide. “This alignment, integration, and strong support from above enabled us to take such an ambitious approach across three connected levers: People, Process, and Philanthropy,” Najmi explains. It isn’t enough, she notes, for a CSR team to believe in shared value—leaders across the business must also be convinced, and willing to back that conviction with both voice and resources.

For Citizens, the convening role the bank played—stepping up to bring the Rhode Island Bankers Association and competing institutions into the same room—required institutional credibility and a willingness to put the collective goal ahead of competitive advantage. That kind of leadership doesn’t appear on an org chart; it has to be exercised.

Con Edison’s leadership story runs in two directions at once: inward and outward. Internally, the company created direct pathways between community partners and senior business units, including Regional Corporate Affairs and Environmental Health & Safety. Externally, Con Edison convened a cross-sector conversation at the 2025 SOMOS Conference that brought together government, labor, community organizations, and industry around climate resilience and workforce development—with The Point CDC grounding the conversation in lived community experience. That juxtaposition—utility convening community, community informing utility—is what a mature corporate citizenship relationship looks like.

What Scales is a Mindset

When Novo Nordisk describes its plans to expand The Interrupt to Philadelphia and beyond, it offers a telling formulation: “The results in Alabama and Washington, D.C. have given us something more valuable than a program—they have given us a replicable approach.” Citizens makes a parallel point about the Banking Micropathway: the model is designed to replicate across additional markets, through the same Education Design Lab partnership infrastructure. Con Edison’s cohort model—six partners, one learning community—is itself a template: a way of organizing grantees so that the whole becomes more capable than the sum of its parts.

Micron frames it most directly: “When people, process, and philanthropy align, AI moves from experimentation to scalable and lasting impact.”

That alignment—of internal capability, external partnership, community trust, and leadership commitment—is what separates programs that make noise from programs that make change. This year’s Innovation Award winners have built something harder to replicate than a technology platform or a grant program. They’ve built a way of working.