Trailblazers of 2025
Every generation transforms what leadership means. We are now seeing a new generation of innovators who are transforming radical ideas into workable solutions for the future. This age of next-gen leadership is not a matter of power or position only; it is of ingenuity, of sympathy, of doing. These leaders are demonstrating that innovation and responsibility, ideas and implementation can work together to lead to success.
Here, we profile five such trailblazers who are leaving their footprints in various fields, demonstrating that vision can indeed be translated into reality.
Basima Abdulrahman: Green Builder for a Resilient Future
KESK (Iraq) Founder & CEO, Basima Abdulrahman, is speeding up sustainable construction in developing markets. Through her leadership in promoting energy-efficient construction and green building features, she assists urban centres in reducing carbon emissions and enhancing standards of living. Her style is a combination of policy work, industry experience, and on-the-job project implementation, which is precisely the type of pragmatic aspiration that Next-gen Leadership requires. The mission of Abdulrahman is most rapidly scaled when locally rooted and commercially viable solutions are the answer to the problem of climate action.
Ham Serunjogi: Fintech Access at Continental Scale
Ham Serunjogi, Co-founder and CEO of Chipper Cash, is bringing low-cost cross-border payments and digital wallets to Africa -making daily payments and small businesses in Africa less painful. Instead of making financial inclusion a slogan, he is putting down rails that enhance remittances, savings and commerce. In his model, Serunjogi demonstrates that Next-gen Leadership is more of a distribution than an invention: millions of people getting trustworthy, controlled services.
Éléonore Crespo: Planning Software that Powers Decisions
Co-founder and Co-CEO of Pigment (France), Éléonore Crespo, manages a fast-growing platform that enables companies to plan, predict and make decisions faster, with shared and real-time data models. She is setting the bar higher in terms of operational agility in volatile markets by substituting brittle spreadsheets with open, collaborative tools. The path that Crespo has followed exemplifies next-gen leadership that combines product clarity, go-to-market discipline, and people-first culture.
César de la Fuente: AI for Antibiotics and Global Health
As a Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, César de la Fuente applies artificial intelligence to identify and develop new antibiotics- solving one of the most pressing health problems of the century, antimicrobial resistance. The work of his lab shortens discovery timelines and creates avenues where standard pipelines fail. It is Next-gen Leadership in science: rigorous, high-impact, and squarely focused on the public good.
Haruka Mera: Crowdfunding That Empowers Communities
Haruka Mera, Founder & CEO of READYFOR (Japan), established one of the most popular crowdfunding platforms in the country and redirected the funds into social, cultural, and disaster-relief projects that may not find funding otherwise. She transforms empathy into action by using trust, transparency, and community storytelling. Next-gen Leadership appears in Mera as an infrastructure of hope, which means that it enables citizens to self-organise and address real problems.
Turning Vision into Reality
The common denominator among these innovators is the fact that they have the ability to think in tangible terms. They are all in different careers like business, technology, law, architecture, and education but all have one common goal, to make a great change.
That is what next-gen leadership will look like in 2025: both innovation and empathy and vision and execution. Not only are these leaders establishing a new standard in their own professions, but they are transforming society with the principles of inclusivity, sustainability, and cooperation.
A Future Driven by Purpose
As the world speeds up in the face of uncertainty and rapid change, the value of these kinds of leaders only grows. These show us that a leader does not maintain things as they are, but rather creates new possibilities.
The innovators of next-gen leadership are showing us that the future is not something to look forward to, but something to create, bit by bit, by being bold enough to think and being responsible enough to act.
