This year marks our sixth annual Innovator 25 class in EMEA. Once again, this year’s list features remarkable innovators who are addressing the industry’s challenges with ingenuity and creativity to make meaningful (and hopefully lasting) change at time when it's needed more than ever. This tumultuous year has forced the industry to embrace change and reimagine the future of work, campaigns and live events.

In the year that Black Lives Matter gained unstoppable momentum, many of the innovators on the 2020 list are leading the way – often vocally – on breaking down barriers and moving beyond talk to action on diversity, equity and inclusion, both within the communications world and in wider society. The EMEA cohort also includes pioneers of the virtual agency model and B Corp champions, as well as those focused on employee engagement, others who are dedicated to proving, at last, the value of PR to businesses via data, analytics and new technology, and those who taking risks to produce groundbreaking creative work.

This year, in our most diverse and female list ever, we celebrate professionals who are innovating within traditional organisations, and those who are leading the way in communications for new industry areas and categories. Above all, everyone in the Innovator 25 EMEA has more than risen to the occasion in this strangest and toughest of years, and are embracing how the pandemic is changing the way we engage, live and work, forever. 

We once again feature one communications innovator from the region who isn’t, in fact, in comms. Last year we included environmental campaigner Greta Thunberg, who has not only radically shifted the messages around climate change, but changed hearts, minds and behaviour; in 2018 we looked to the business world and named Iceland’s managing director Richard Walker, who has led his agencies to transform the supermarket’s reputation, particularly around sustainability.

This year, we turn to another remarkable young campaigner, who – somewhat unexpectedly for a Premier League footballer – stepped up to the plate with clear, empathetic, persuasive messages to making sure the UK’s poorest families are able to continue to access free school meals during the holidays, taking on the Government, and winning. He is, of course, Marcus Rashford. 
The 23-year-old is one of 14 Brits in the Innovator 25 for EMEA this year: unsurprisingly, the highest proportion of the class are based in the dense UK market, with other markets represented including the UAE, South Africa, the Netherlands, Sweden, France, Germany and Spain.

You can read profiles of this year's Innovator 25, including a Q&A on innovation, by clicking on the individuals’ names in the right-hand column.