Google Innovate
"Innovation is not a sprint to Eureka, its a relay race - and no one crosses the finish line alone."
The Challenge
Innovation stories are usually told as one single "eureka moment" — one genius, one breakthrough, one highlight reel. Google wanted a more honest, more inspiring story - one that showed exactly how female innovators of the past built the foundation for the next generation of change-makers. The project had to remind us that great success only comes from a willingness to fail and take risks - that collaboration and shared vision are strengths, and that changing the world takes the audacity to believe you can. For a piece intended to headline ADWEEK New York in front of top agency producers, the challenge was doing this in a way that felt genuinely original, using the concept of 'Women in Innovation' not as just the subject of the piece, but as the delivery system for it.
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The Strategy
The solution was to build an entire short film around a single physical metaphor: a real, fully functioning Rube Goldberg machine. Each woman's innovation journey was threaded into its own phase of the machine, with a lightbulb marking each transition — igniting at the exact moment one woman's success became the literal trigger for the next. Each phase of the build was mapped to a key pillar of innovation — risk, failure, insight, collaboration, and audacity — so that the machine's physical chain reaction and the innovators' journey told the same story, mechanically and narratively, in real time. Built as an original, functioning device rather than a visual gimmick, the machine became the storytelling engine itself — the kind of craft distinction a room of creative directors and producers is specifically primed to notice and respect.
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The Outcome
The Google Innovate short film delivered, and its grand reception proved it. Tubefilter named it their "favorite tribute" of the season, specifically praising the craft behind building a real, physically functioning Rube Goldberg machine rather than relying on CGI — a distinction that mattered to an industry audience who could tell the difference. Critics and viewers alike in the Tech and Advertising space responded to the underlying metaphor itself: using a literal chain reaction to represent how historical women in STEM paved the way for the innovators that followed. Riding a wave of viral interest in engineering-driven storytelling — the film's reach extended well past the room at ADWEEK New York, gaining organic traction with many audiences.
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