1
Senior Vice President of Industrial Design, Apple
Ten years ago, before the iPod and the iPhone became objects of the world's electro-lust, Jonathan Ive sat down with Fast Company to talk about his first Apple blockbuster, the iMac. The machine could not have been a more radical departure from the ubiquitous beige-box PC: a desktop...
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26
Chairman, FDIC
What with subprime mortgages and collateralized-debt obligations, creativity in finance has gotten a bad rap. But Sheila Bair's combination of foresight, consistency, effective use of resources, and sensible ideas to secure the banking system looks pretty creative -- and significant -- to...
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51
Partner architect, MSN and Microsoft Visual Earth
For years, techies have sought to display huge files in high resolution without crashing a computer. Blaise Aguera y Arcas did it, with technology called Seadragon. At the 2007 TED conference, he showed a multigigabyte quilt of slides, then magnified one slide to reveal the entire text of...
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76
Garden designer
"The idea," says the 64-year-old Dutchman known as the father of the influential New Perennial movement, "is not to copy nature, but to give a feeling of nature." In Piet Oudolf's gardens -- from private landscapes in Europe to public parks in Chicago and New York -- towering grasses...
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2
Cochair and trustee, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
Maybe it should be called the Melinda & Bill Gates Foundation. Her influence over the world's largest foundation is enormous -- Bill has said it wouldn't exist if it weren't for her. She has championed not only big-picture, tech-oriented solutions to improve health and education over...
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27
Vice President, business analytics and mathematical sciences, IBM
"Mathematics," says Brenda L. Dietrich, 49, "is not mechanical. You're finding how things look different on the surface and then seeing what they have in common underneath." Her team at IBM studies behind-the-scenes processes in business -- from manufacturing scheduling to logistics to...
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52
President, Prologue Films
"My job is to make people in the theater feel like they don't want to be anywhere else," says Kyle Cooper. He means from the beginning of a film to its very end: His specialty is the opening and closing credits. His fantasias include the immersion into a serial killer's mind in Seven, the...
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77
President, Ingenious Designs
A knack for inventing simple solutions to everyday problems -- and marketing them on cable TV -- catapulted Joy Mangano to business stardom. Her first hit was the self-wringing Miracle Mop; she sold 18,000 in 20 minutes on QVC in 1992. Then came no-slip Huggable Hangers and the roll-up...
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3
CEO, Better Place
"How do you run an entire country without oil, with no new science, without government assistance, and in a time frame that's fast enough to get off oil before we run out of planet?" The answer, 41-year-old Shai Agassi says, is electric cars. He's not alone in his enthusiasm, but he may...
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28
President, Polyphony Digital
The 42-year-old Japanese game designer is on the fast track: He has created eight Gran Turismo games, attracted a cult following among PlayStation users, and helped Nissan design the technology for its GT-R sports car, which appears in Gran Turismo 5 Prologue. Kazunori Yamauchi's games...
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53
Worldwide chairman, pharmaceuticals group, Johnson & Johnson
Sherilyn McCoy is one of the most powerful women in pharma, heading J&J's work in biotech, internal medicine, and virology. Her versatility makes her a dynamo. Over three decades at the company, she has marketed skin-care products, overseen operations at home and abroad, and run the...
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78
Professor, Brigham Young University
Soon after graduating from college, David Wiley had an epiphany that has moved him into the front ranks of education revolutionaries: "Unlike a real calculator, a calculator embedded in a Web page can be used by 100,000 people at the same time." At BYU, he designed a course as an online...
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4
Chief Executive Officer, Netflix
Reed Hastings, 49, could have stuck with his first breakthrough idea -- Netflix recently mailed its 2-billionth DVD. Instead, he's swiftly embraced streaming online and direct to TV via half a dozen Netflix-ready devices made by LG, Samsung, Microsoft, and others. Hastings says his...
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29
Owner, Chop Shop Music Supervision
"I've spent 14 years listening to music set to pictures," says Alexandra Patsavas, 41, "and I have a strong sense of how it all works together." Her gift for matching the right song to the right scene in some of television's most talked-about shows, including Mad Men, enhances the value...
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54
Principal, Wonderwall
Tokyo-based Masamichi Katayama, 42, has created everything from furniture and lighting to TV-studio sets, but it's his shops for clients such as Fred Perry and A Bathing Ape that have cemented his reputation as uncommonly clever. In Uniqlo's NYC store, he deployed an army of motorized...
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79
Executive vice president of production, Digital Domain
When it came to the holy grail of special effects -- creating a digitized human head indistinguishable from the real thing -- no one expected it to be created by a bunch of guys who make ads for BMW and Coca-Cola. But Ed Ulbrich, 44, left the visual-effects world breathless last year when...
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5
President, Disney Channels Worldwide
If you're sick of Hannah Montana, The Cheetah Girls, or High School Musical, blame Rich Ross. He has orchestrated the rise and global spread of that wildly popular, hyper, squealy, and lucrative brand of entertainment through a network of nearly 100 channels in 163 countries and 32...
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30
Inventor, cofounder, Nano-Terra
His breakthroughs in molec-ular self-assembly and other production processes over a 45-year career at Harvard and MIT were a catalyst for today's proliferation of biotechnology and nanotechnology. Dubbed a legend in chemistry by his peers, George Whitesides, 69, has cofounded more than a...
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55
Mashup artist
Gregg Gillis, 27, is the first truly postmodern rock star. The ex-biomedical engineer layers unlicensed song samples and "performs" them live, with him and his laptop center stage. Last year, he released his fourth album, Feed the Animals, online, using Radiohead's pay-what-you-want model...
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80
Director of game R&D, Institute for the Future
Thirty thousand Mexicans are rioting in the streets after the price of tortilla flour quadrupled for the third time in three months. Hotel owners in Memphis are installing "anti-senior citizen" signs to keep away the thousands of aging Gulf Coasters trying to escape another violent season...
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6
Vice president of global design, Nike
Sandy Bodecker, 56, believes inspiration is everywhere. Last year, his team found what they were looking for in suspension-bridge cables. The result: the revolutionary Flywire technology, and the lightest and strongest high-performance footwear ever. Before he became Nike's first VP of...
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31
Cofounder, Studio Ghibli
When Pixar's animators need inspiration, they watch Hayao Miyazaki's movies. The giant of anime has been elevating cartoons into epic cinematic events for more than two decades, with fantastic, award-winning films such as My Neighbor Totoro and Spirited Away. The writer-director's stories...
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56
President & CEO, W!ldbrain
When Charles Rivkin became head of W!ldbrain in 2005, the Jim Henson vet wanted to make a statement. He started with punctuation (hence the "!"). Since then, W!ldbrain's Sesame Street -- like flagship series, Yo Gabba Gabba!, has done wonders for Nickelodeon, averaging 3.4 million viewers...
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81
CFO, Cronan
What's in a name? Everything, if you're the founders of the Berkeley, California, graphic-design agency that has christened products like TiVo and Amazon's Kindle. "Your name and logo should be your hardest-working employees," Michael Cronan says. He and Karin Hibma have helped brand more...
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7
Executive Vice President, Nokia
Tero Ojanperä's career path at Nokia is a map of the company's direction -- from head of research, to CTO, to leading the entertainment division. Slowly, he's managing Nokia's transformation into a multimedia company. He launched Ovi, Nokia's answer to the online Apple Store, in May...
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32
Global director of media arts, TBWA\Worldwide
The resulting ad -- celebrating iconoclasts from Gandhi to Einstein ("Here's to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes ...") -- was signature Clow. It tugged at the heart and purse strings simultaneously. Clow's "Think Different"...
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57
Chief executive officer, Ohai
How do you make money from things that don't exist? Susan Wu intends to show you. The first venture capitalist to focus on virtual goods -- products that don't exist offline, such as Facebook gifts and everything your avatar needs in Second Life -- Wu is the doyenne of this growing niche...
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82
CEO, Cronan
What's in a name? Everything, if you're the founders of the Berkeley, California, graphic-design agency that has christened products like TiVo and Amazon's Kindle. "Your name and logo should be your hardest-working employees," Michael Cronan says. He and Karin Hibma have helped brand more...
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8
President, Comedy Central
First came South Park, then The Daily Show and its Colbert spin-off. Now Michele Ganeless, 44, is expanding into digital territory. So far, Comedy Central has launched Web sites for all its shows as well as stand-alone sites such as Jokes.com, the largest Internet archive of stand-up...
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33
Chief technology officer, Cisco
With a last name like Warrior, you expect ferociousness. In fact, Padmasree Warrior is just the opposite -- a humble leader who says she likes to play practical jokes on her staff. She worked her way up to CTO at Motorola before joining Cisco in 2007. Her ingenious approach today can best...
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58
Equity partner, Black Star Lines
Like many young students, June Arunga took time off from law school for a road trip. But it was no spring break. Working with a BBC TV film crew, she traveled 5,000 miles from Cairo to Cape Town, documenting a grueling journey that brought her from war zones, mining towns, and refugee...
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83
Musician
Brain Eno, the father of ambient music, is still in the vanguard. Take his recent collaboration with David Byrne. Byrne wrote lyrics in New York to the instrumental tracks Eno had sent from Lon-don. Then they prereleased the album, Everything That Happens Will Happen Today, online. Now he...
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9
Executive chairman, Palm
Jon Rubinstein is trying to do for Palm what he did for Apple. As the head of hardware engineering at Apple until 2006 (and the first head of the iPod division), Rubinstein, 52 -- aka the Podfather -- led the development of what's under the hood of the iPod, iMac, and iBook, helping...
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34
CEO, Twitter
@ev Site getting more buzz than F-book. Yearly traffic up 1,200%. Estimated worth = $500 million+. Wow! #twitter -- by Dan Macsai
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59
Head of strategy, Barbarian Group
"If a programmer saw my code, they'd probably vomit," says Noah Brier, 27. A self-described tinkerer, he feeds his online-strategy work for clients including GE and Dove by creating, on his own time, compelling projects at the intersection of social media, digital advertising, and...
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84
Director, Green Works, Clorox
Jessica Buttimer caught on early to the appeal of "natural" cleaning products. So when Clorox chemists devel-oped some promising eco- friendly formulas, she saw the opportunity to launch the company's first new brand in 20 years. To answer consumers' concern about nontoxic cleaners -- "...
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10
Chief executive officer, Focus Features
Perhaps the only person in Hollywood who can rival Meryl Streep's versatility is James Schamus. In addition to being a CEO, he's a veteran screenwriter, Columbia University film professor, producer, marketer, distributor, and sometime composer. "There's nobody else like him in the entire...
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35
Founding chairman, Society for Organizational Learning
We owe the very idea of the learning organization to management strategist Peter Senge. In the 1990s, he provided the ultimate decoder ring for CEOs who wanted to apply collaboration and systems theory in the workplace. His current research and latest book, The Necessary Revolution, is...
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60
Television producer, writer
Josh Schwartz has made his name chronicling the young, pretty, and privileged on TV, first with The O.C., then with Gossip Girl. But after his Girl found unexpected success online -- new episodes routinely top iTunes' most-downloaded chart -- Schwartz, 32, pitched his latest beautiful...
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85
Chief of minimally invasive, general and robotic surgery, University of Illinois Medical Center
The Italian-born and trained surgeon has been "the first in the world to successfully complete some of the most complex robotic procedures," says Ryan Rhodes of Intuitive Surgical -- and he's done it in operating rooms that are poorly laid out for robotic instruments. So Dr. Pier...
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11
Director, HP Labs
Prith Banerjee's job is to gaze into the $150 million crystal ball that is HP Labs and see what the future holds. Since he was lured away from the University of Illinois in Chicago in 2007, HP Labs has announced products such as flexible, paperlike display screens and CloudPrint, which...
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36
Musician
Pharrell Williams knows it all starts with a beat -- he got his start on the snare drum in his high-school marching band back in Virginia Beach, Virginia. As half of the production duo known as the Neptunes, he has helped everyone from Britney Spears to Justin Timberlake to Madonna to the...
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61
Author, director, producer
Nora Ephron, who is partly responsible for the rise of the chick flick and Meg Ryan's career (Sleepless in Seattle, You've Got Mail), is going for cross-generational appeal with Julie and Julia, out in August. Starring Meryl Streep as Julia Child and Amy Adams as Julia Powell, a thirtyish...
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86
Artist
When not drawing -- and detonating -- pictures made from gunpowder or staging massive outdoor "explosion events" like the fireworks at the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, Cai Guo-Qiang is busy breaking records. His 14 gunpowder pieces sold at Christie's in...
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12
Chief information officer, Defense Information Systems Agency
John Garing powwowed with such luminaries as Amazon's Werner Vogels and Salesforce.com's Marc Benioff to bring cloud computing, network services, and Web 2.0 tools to the Department of Defense. Garing's biggest challenge: overcoming the "box hugging" impulse to control servers, data, and...
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37
Founder, University of the People
College tuition in the U.S. has risen more since 1990 than the price of any other good or service. That's why Shai Reshef decided to commit his fortune -- made when he sold a for-profit educational-services firm to Kaplan in 2005 -- to opening a tuition-free, online-only, open-source...
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62
Creative director, Puma
Fashion designers aren't new at Puma -- as guests. But now Puma has hired Hussein Cha-layan, 38, as its first creative director and bought a major-ity stake in his own business. Known for fusing high tech and high fashion in pieces such as a Swarovski frock studded with LEDs, the two-time...
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87
Director, MIT's AgeLab
Making aging less of a drag is Joseph Coughlin's mission -- and with some 80,000 Americans turning 60 each day, it's a more pressing task than ever. Coughlin, 47, runs the first multidisciplinary research lab devoted to using smart technology to bolster older folks' quality of life. It's...
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13
Fashion designer
According to her boss, PPR CEO François-Henri Pinault, fashion designer and Beatle progeny Stella McCartney is the new face of responsible luxury. "Stella has set the bar," he told Britain's Sunday Times. Across the pond, the Natural Resources Defense Council honored her this...
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38
Architect
The 73-year-old Baron Foster of Thames Bank has had as rough a year as any of his fellow starchitects: Work in Russia has tanked; his remodeling of Europe's biggest soccer stadium, Barcelona's famed Nou Camp, has been delayed; and he had to lay off more than 300 employees. But the guy who...
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63
Chief creative officer, Joost
"I really concentrate on flow versus feature," says Henrik Werdelin. Inspired by how people move in the real world, he designs the online TV service Joost so that no matter how you get to the site, you find shows you didn't know you wanted to watch. He has led the transformation of Joost...
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88
Creative director, Imaginary Forces
Under Karin Fong's leadership, Imaginary Forces, best known for its innovative movie titles, has expanded into new territory: commercial work for companies such as Microsoft, Pepsi, and Target, and design experiences for architectural spaces like the Museum of Modern Art in New York and...
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14
Founder, Bad Robot Productions
J.J. Abrams warps Time at will. Past, present, and future coexist as a kind of fluid that cannot be contained. The camera jumps back and forth in time. Characters age and grow younger again. Time itself accelerates, then slows. "It's intriguing to play with exactly when you learn elements...
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39
Executive creative director, BBDO
For Greg Hahn, a self-described eavesdropping addict, being nosy isn't just a hobby. It's the weapon that has allowed the master copywriter to consistently lend human voices and emotions to huge corporations such as Citigroup (the "Live Richly" campaign for Citibank), eBay (the "It" ads...
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64
Chief executive officer, Tapulous
Three days after its release last July, Tap Tap Revenge -- an iPhone game that's basically Dance Dance Revolution except that you tap your fingers to a song rather than dance to it -- shot to No. 1 among free game downloads on iTunes. It was testimony to the appeal of playing along to...
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89
Manager, T-One Design
A bicycle with front-wheel drive seems like a smart idea to us, but it wasn't until Larry Chen entered the annual International Bicycle Design Competition for the seventh time last year that he finally nabbed the grand prize. His winner: Sunny Day, a compact solar-powered electric bicycle...
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15
Design Director, Morphosis
You have to admire a guy gutsy enough to build an office building in Paris taller than the Eiffel Tower. By 2012, Thom Mayne's 68-story La Phare ("the Lighthouse") will rise over the La Defense district. The 2005 Pritzker Prize winner is famous for audacious buildings: the bunkerlike...
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40
Author, screenwriter
"Writing is, like death, a lonely business," according to Neil Gaiman. But the prolific wordsmith has made it a bit less so, building a global community of fans of all ages and in many media, including comic books (Sandman), novels (American Gods), TV (the BBC's Neverwhere), and a...
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65
Creative director, Marni
Consuelo Castiglioni doesn't play the usual couture game. She's publicity-shy. She does not advertise. She won't hustle celebrities. But Castiglioni is a master of her craft, defining Marni as a house of unusual shapes and idiosyncratic prints (she teamed with singer/painter Kim Gordon to...
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90
CEO & executive producer, Original Productions
Thom Beers is a storyteller, and most of his tales are true. To find them, flip on your TV. At any given hour on any given day, something from Original Productions will be on. Ice Road Truckers, Deadliest Catch, Monster Garage, Verminators -- all are his creations. At one point, he had 12...
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16
Senior Platform Manager, Facebook
He's Facebook's strategic thinker on the next big thing in social media -- which isn't the redesign of Facebook's home page, but identity protection on the Web. The issue is who is going to set the standards for open-identity protocols that would enable you to safely take your online...
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41
Writer, illustrator, producer
The extraordinary Maurice Sendak has sold millions of copies of Where the Wild Things Are (1963) and In the Night Kitchen (1970); most recently, he collaborated with Tony Kushner on Brundibar (the book debuted in 2003, the play in 2006). Sendak, now 80, has designed operas, won myriad...
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66
President of NBC Universal Cable
"We're escapism," Bonnie Hammer told The New York Times last year. Which might explain why the USA Network's ratings have soared under her watch -- its 2008 prime-time viewership was the largest ever for any basic-cable channel -- and her products contributed more than $1 billion to NBC...
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91
Chief executive officer, Growing Power
If it were up to Will Allen, low-income urbanites would be cultivating fresh fruit, vegetables, and fish in community centers, in empty lots, even on their own rooftops. "People don't realize that cities originally produced the food," says Allen, an urban-farming expert who has pioneered...
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17
Product Manager, Google Maps and Google Earth
Incorporating photos into online maps wasn't a new idea at Google, but no one had figured out how to pull it off until Stephen Chau tackled what became Street View, the company's fastest-growing product of 2008. Chau, 29, is a former Goldman Sachs banker (he worked on Google's IPO) who...
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42
Fashion designer, LVMH
Marc Jacobs has "made fashion hip, but not inaccessibly hip," says Vogue editor Anna Wintour. Accessibly hip enough for him to build a $5 billion empire within LVMH that delights both the moneyed elite and the allowance-driven economy (his junk-store concept -- $11 flip-flops, $55 rubber...
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67
Senior digital-imaging evangelist, Adobe
If teaching others to express themselves is a measure of creativity, then Julieanne Kost is off the charts. Part teacher, part marketer, she is Photoshop guru to legions of followers. Whether helping pros with the digital equivalent of darkroom techniques or showing amateurs an...
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92
Dean of fashion, Parsons
After 20 years in the industry, Simon Collins is grooming the next wave of Tom Fords to be as prepared for the boardroom as they are for the run-way. In less than one year, he has devised a new model for his 1,300 students to collab-orate with companies such as Ellen Tracy, Henri Bendel,...
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18
Chief economist, Microsoft
As a kid, Susan Athey tagged along when her grandfather sold cattle at auction. "I'd wonder, Why is this how they sell cows?" she recalls. At 38, she's now Microsoft's chief economist and a Harvard prof, asking grown-up versions of that question. Athey studies everything from government...
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43
Presidential Fellow, MIT Media Lab
In the MIT Media Lab's basement workshop sits a machine that can slice human bone instantly using a blast of water mixed with garnet dust. It's Neri Oxman's favorite. "The laser cutter is very feminine, elegant. The water-jet cutter is very masculine. It cuts anything. To be here at 2 a.m...
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68
Principal, Zaha Hadid Architects
If there's a starchitect who is still shining, it's the Baghdad-born, London-based Zaha Hadid, whose firm's profits were up 400% last year. Hadid, 59, who won the Pritz-ker Prize in 2004, has created astonishing projects around the globe -- from the BMW Central Building in Germany to the...
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93
Principal, Bensley Design Studios
Bill Bensley's design philosophy: Lebih gila, lebih baik. That's Indonesian for "the odder, the better." For the American-born, Bangkok-based architect and landscape designer who specializes in luxury resorts, that means blurring the line between interior and exte-rior, creating lush...
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19
Senior vice president of merchandising, Target
Hiring boldface fashion designers to do lines for big-box retailers was an innovation born when Trish Adams signed on Mossimo for Target in 2001. Since 2006, she has lured the likes of Proenza Schouler, Luella Bartley, and Behnaz Sarafpour for the Go International cheap-chic lines, which...
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44
Chef
In this era of celebrity chefs and haute cuisine gone less haute, Alsace-born Jean-Georges Vongerichten is the rare talent who has grown his empire without resorting to the indignity of slapping his face on a frying pan or frozen pizza. He already has 18 restaurants -- eight of them in...
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69
Musician and record producer
You may know Dave Stewart as the Eurythmics cofounder and a singer's songwriter -- he's written hits for Tom Petty, Celine Dion, and No Doubt. But it's the rest of his CV that's unexpectedly impressive. He started the consulting company DeepStew with Deepak Chopra, acts as U.S. creative...
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94
Lighting designer
Kevin Adams is on the leading edge of the post-incandescent age on Broadway, exploiting the potential of CFL bulbs, fluorescent tubes, glass and flex neon, and the latest LED technology. His work for Spring Awakening -- brilliant white light for the 19th-century play's scenes and...
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20
Sustainable design program manager, Autodesk
Dawn Danby pops upover a Skype connection on the screen of my computer, holding up her laptop to the camera mounted in another. The machine in her hands shows a screen shot of Ecotect, a building-design program that represents the type of sustainability software she's helping develop for...
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45
Director of user experience, Intel Digital Home Group
Genevieve Bell thinks about people. She travels the world studying us -- how we think, how we live, and what place technology has in our lives. This year, the Stanford-educated anthropologist is doing that in her homeland, as a "Thinker in Residence" for the government of South Australia...
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70
Artist and Designer
Brian Donnelly has been compared to Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring, both of whom straddled the divide between street and institutional art. But Donnelly has arguably surpassed them with his one-man empire. Business at his Tokyo-based company OriginalFake, created as an outlet for...
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95
In a quest to make user-generated manufacturing a reality, Kohei Nishiyama launched a Web site where independent designers can initiate production of an item when orders reach a break-even point. Then, using a similar site that Nishiyama created with retailer Muji, a college student with...
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21
Owner, Tyler Perry Studios
He writes, directs, produces, acts, and scores -- Tyler Perry controls an entertainment empire and moneymaking machine that includes the hit show Tyler Perry's House of Payne and movies featuring his alter-ego Madea, a jumbo, no-nonsense granny with a knack for physical comedy. Perry's...
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46
Founder, chief executive officer, Red Digital Cinema
Jim Jannard is the type of obsessive freak who will pour and break the foundation for a new house a half-dozen times. And when he wants something that doesn't exist, he creates it. After selling his sunglass company, Oakley, to Luxottica for $2.1 billion in 2007, Jannard focused on...
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71
Director, Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine
If a salamander can grow a new limb, Dr. Anthony Atala likes to say, why can't a person? It's hardly an idle question. Atala, 50, is at the forefront of the study of growing human tissue, an emerging field also known as regenerative medicine. He made headlines around the world in 2006...
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96
Light-rail designer, Parsons Brinckerhoff
Mass transit is crucial to a carbon-frugal economy and livable, vibrant cities; $150 billion in new federal spending for infrastructure, including a substantial chunk for light-rail, drives the point home. An unassuming Texan who has worked in Germany, France, and the U.K., John Swanson...
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22
Artist
Hate him or loathe him, Damien Hirst is an artistic and business provocateur. Who else could render a photo of Bill Gates standing in front of his own famous work (The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living) and turn it into a painting that sells for more than half...
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47
Composer
You might know A.R. Rahman as the Oscar-winning composer behind Slumdog Millionaire's "Jai Ho," which has been downloaded more than 100,000 times on iTunes and was re-recorded as a hit collaboration with the Pussycat Dolls. But Rahman has been writing Bollywood hits since 1992. His...
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72
Inventor, cofounder, Makani Power
At 35, Saul Griffith is already a prolific -- and eclectic -- inventor and entrepreneur. He has helped launch a half-dozen startups around his creations: a portable machine that makes cheap corrective lenses; a hand-powered gen-erator for recharging handheld devices; Instructables, a Web...
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97
Chief executive officer, Imax
When Richard Gelfond and then co-CEO (now chairman) Bradley Wechsler acquired Imax in 1994, it was a museum-movie staple. Then they asked to see the classic 2001: A Space Odyssey on an Imax screen, and, recalls 53-year-old Gelfond, "We both came out saying, 'We have to figure out a way to...
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23
Chief technology officer, DreamWorks Animation
Whether it's making Shrek come alive, guiding the 20 million hours of computing time to build Kung Fu Panda, or putting the amoeba-like B.O.B. into 3-D for Monsters vs. Aliens, DreamWorks' problems eventually find Ed Leonard. "For every film we start, we never know how we're going to...
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48
Chairman, Interscope Geffen A&M Records
In music, all roads lead to -- and from -- Jimmy Iovine. The resurrection of the New Kids on the Block. The exclusive Best Buy deal for Guns N' Roses. MySpace's music venture. Dr. Dre's high-tech headphones. Iovine had a hand in all these projects -- and he's still thinking big, bold, and...
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73
Executive chef and co-owner, Blue Hill restaurants
"Manhattan's answer to the Farmer in the Dell," as Dan Barber was called by a New York Times restaurant critic, is more than the foodies' latest locavore darling. The driving spirit behind the two Blue Hill restaurants, Barber, 39, is a passionate advocate for regional farm networks. They...
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98
Blogger
Scott Schuman, 41, started his fashion blog, The Sartorialist, to "share photos of everyday people I thought looked great." More than 2,000 posts later, the former Valentino marketer has a monthly column in GQ, a six-figure book deal with Penguin, and a booming photography business. (He...
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24
Designer, creative director, Uniqlo
The high-fashion/mass-marketing movement seems to be reaching a new phase with Jil Sander's new project: The German designer, who became famous for her luxurious if minimalist couture, has signed on as the creative director for Japanese retailer Uniqlo. Sander, who sold her namesake label...
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49
Founder, Bankable Enterprises
The former model has built a distinct brand -- and media empire -- by presenting herself as the fun, driven mentor to a young, multiethnic, and aspirational female demographic. No idle pretty face, Tyra Banks, 35, has taken a hyperactive hand in creating several reality programs,...
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74
Director and founder, Plexifilm
Gary Hustwit's new film, Objectified, got everyone's attention at this year's South by Southwest festival. So did the fact that he lost his iPhone at the premiere -- a delicious irony for a man obsessed by design and consumerism. Objectified veers from musical montages of Ikea, Target,...
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99
Creative director, thatgamecompany
If video games can be art, the proof is likely to come from Jenova Chen, 27. He explores the expressive possibilities of game design by tapping into emotions rather than relying on virtual violence. His thesis project, which got 300,000 plays in 10 days, won his company a three-game deal...
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25
CEO, Red Bull
Last year, Dietrich Mateschitz's Austria-based company sold 4 billion cans (more than its next three energy-drink competitors combined), reportedly spent more than $300 million on marketing, and pushed the category beyond $30 billion. All that has less to do with the drink than Mateschitz...
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50
Partner, Fireman Capital
The music industry's business model "is clearly and completely broken," says Lisa Ellis. "Changing it from the inside, like so many smart people have tried to do, is impossible." So in December, after huge success branding such artists as John Legend and Beyoncé, Ellis left Sony...
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75
Cofounder, Rockstar Games
Critics may decry Sam Houser's "brutally violent" and "sexually explicit" world in Grand Theft Auto, but there's no denying his genius. He took control of GTA III in 2001 and turned the already-popular series into a stunning 3-D playground, where gamers can go anywhere and talk to anyone...
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Founder, Full Tilt Poker
He played poker as a kid with his dad, a professor of game theory, so it's not a surprise that he was the first poker player to win a tournament prize of more than $1 million. Now 46, Chris Ferguson, who has a PhD in computer science from UCLA, has claimed some $7.3 million in winnings....
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