They came, they saw, they left an indelible mark on industry. From the inventor of the mouse to the founders of FedEx, Intel and General Motors, here are the 20 greatest innovators of the past 75 years:

To celebrate its 75th anniversary, BusinessWeek profiled the foremost innovators of the past 75 years. We picked the 20 that we thought have been the most influential on the industrial marketplace:

1) Bill Gates: While Microsoft Corp. is often accused of usurping the innovations of others, William H. Gates III is a great innovator because his vision galvanized the PC industry, transforming it into the behemoth it is today.

2) Timothy J. Berners-Lee: This British-born computer scientist created the simple program that developed into the World Wide Web, sparking a revolution that’s still ongoing and changing the way many of us live.

3) Steve Jobs: Co-founder and chief executive of Apple Computer Inc., Steven P. Jobs is one of the Information Age’s greatest innovators, delivering digital technology–in brilliantly designed forms–to the masses.

4) Jack Welch: As CEO of General Electric Co. for 20 years, John F. Welch Jr. became an icon of American business. He made sure all managers became mentors and thus transformed GE into a global teaching organization, nurturing executive talent in the process.

5) Robert Swanson and Herbert Boyer: Swanson, a venture capitalist, and Boyer, a scientist, together created the biotechnology industry by refining and commercializing the process of using recombinant DNA to make drugs.

6) Robert N. Noyce, Gordon E. Moore, and Andrew S. Grove: These three founders of Intel, short for integrated electronics, have followed an awe-inspiring trajectory for innovation, making exponential leaps in computing power and sparking the digital revolution. Consider this: more than 80% of today’s 1 billion-plus PCs run on Intel chips.

7) Larry Roberts: While many have contributed to the development of the Internet, Lawrence G. Roberts was the one who pored through the competing technologies, produced the blueprint for a networking infrastructure and most importantly, got it to work. His brainchild: ARPAnet, the Internet’s predecessor.

8) Fred Smith: Frederick W. Smith, founder of FedEx Corp., transformed the delivery business, setting up his company in 1971 with this promise: guaranteed overnight delivery.

9) Peter Drucker: Acclaimed for his prescient management insights, guru Peter F. Drucker has been the most influential figure in making management a topic of serious study. And at 94, the renowned management expert is still teaching executives how to do better.

10) Douglas C. Engelbart: While his information technology innovations–from his 1963 invention of the mouse to a prototype browser he created in 1968–haven’t improved society as profoundly as he has hoped, his contributions and ideas have provided the underpinnings for the Internet, e-mail and the Windows operating system.

11) Soichiro Honda: As the founder of Honda Motor Co., he led one of the world’s most innovative auto companies and challenged Detroit’s Big Three carmakers in the 1970s and 1980s. His legacy includes globalizing the auto industry, kick-starting a new era of fuel-efficient cars, and waking up Detroit for good.

12) Jane Jacobs: Helping to ignite the so-called New Urbanism movement, Jacobs wrote The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Published in 1961, the book permanently changed urban planning–dimming the emphasis on single-use sections and encouraging architects and city planners to let cities grow organically.

13) Charles H. Townes: As the Nobel prize-winning inventor of the laser, which he patented in 1959, Townes helped transform medicine, telecommunications, consumer electronics and computing. His lasers are even facilitating the development of nanotechnology.

14) Frank Lloyd Wright: Profoundly prolific, Wright masterminded design breakthroughs ranging from the atrium to the carport to the picture window. His industrial design ideas, such as the open workspace, the L-shaped workstation and the oval conference area, have proved enduring, earning him recognition as America’s architect.

15) Akio Morita: Equal parts tech whiz and marketing maven, Morita co-founded Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Corp. in 1946 and then shrewdly renamed it Sony in 1958. His company would then become postwar Japan’s most innovative, generating breakthroughs such as the Walkman portable stereo/cassette player and the compact disk, which it developed with Philips Electronics.

16) William Bradford Shockley, John Bardeen and Walter H. Brattain: Sharing the 1956 Nobel prize for physics, these three men worked together to build the first working transistor. While it was theorist Bardeen and Brattain who developed and carried out experiments at Bell Telephone Laboratories in New Jersey, Shockley was the one who directed the project that yielded this all-important breakthrough. He would later commercialize their innovation through a startup that spawned Silicon Valley.

17) David Lilienthal: As former head of the Tennessee Valley Authority and as the first chief of the Atomic Energy Commission, attorney David Ely Lilienthal epitomized the dedicated public servant and helped shape the U.S. public utility.

18) Frances Perkins: The first woman to hold a Cabinet position, Perkins stood up for workers by pushing for the Fair Labor Standards Act and creating many social programs that provided millions of jobs in the 1930s. Her biggest contribution is helping to establish Social Security.

19) Billy Durant: While William Crapo Durant is famous for being the founder of General Motors, his legacy extends to influencing the way modern American corporations operate. In particular, he championed two concepts that would reshape the automobile industry: customer choice and industry consolidation.

20) John Maynard Keynes: An economic innovator, Keynes can take credit for helping to rescue capitalism during the Great Depression. Moreover, his fiscal insights have been key to preventing business cycle downturns from becoming depressions over the past 50 years.

Source:

A Milestone for BusinessWeek
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