There are no rules about creativity. Which made constructing our list of the 100 Most Creative People in Business a tricky task. We looked for dazzling new thinkers, rising stars, and boldface names who couldn't be ignored. Here are the top 25.
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While most companies create designs that can be manufactured with existing equipment and processes, Ive and his team meet the problem halfway, often overhauling manufacturing to get "perfect" products built on a mass scale. When Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, he vowed that industrial design would be essential to survival. As Jobs soon discovered, Ive shared that vision -- and had the skills to execute it.
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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. The foundation's latest surprise: funding health and education messages to be integrated into Viacom TV programming. Sneaky? Perhaps. Daring? For sure.
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"How do you run an entire country without oil, without government assistance, and in a time frame that's fast enough to get off oil before we run out of planet?" The answer, Shai Agassi says, is electric cars. He has an ambitious vision: battery-powered cars made by Renault-Nissan, a network of charging stations, and cell-phone-like pricing schemes.
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Reed Hastings 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. Hastings says his approach is to "get a mix of inspirations," test innovations, and let the customer decide.
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If you're sick of Hannah Montana or High School Musical, blame Rich Ross. He has orchestrated the rise of that wildly popular, hyper, and lucrative brand of entertainment through a network of nearly 100 channels in 163 countries and 32 languages. His latest gambit: Disney XD, targeting tween boys with the help of ESPN.
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Sandy Bodecker 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.
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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, and announced a new interactive offering from Heroes creator Tim Kring .
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First came South Park, then The Daily Show and its Colbert spin-off. Now Michele Ganeless is expanding into digital territory. So far, Comedy Central has launched Web sites for all its shows, stand-alone sites such as Jokes.com, the largest Internet archive of stand-up videos, plus ringtones and videos from comedians.
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Jon Rubinstein is trying to do for Palm what he did for Apple. As the head of hardware engineering at Apple until 2006, he led the development of what's under the hood of the iPod, iMac, and iBook. Since taking over R&D and product development at Palm, he has poached talent from Steve Jobs and focused Palm on webOS, a long-overdue new operating system, and a touch-screen smartphone of its own, the Pre.
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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. Schamus cofounded Focus in 2002, which produced Oscar winners Milk and Lost in Translation.
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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 hired, HP Labs has announced products such as flexible, paperlike display screens and CloudPrint, which allows printing from a cell phone. Read the full profile

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 process.
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According to her boss, PPR CEO François-Henri Pinault, fashion designer and Beatle progeny Stella McCartney is the new face of responsible luxury. McCartney uses no leather or fur; her skin-care line and ready-to-wear collection are both organic.
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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. "It's intriguing to play with exactly when you learn elements in a story," says the Emmy-winning writer-director-producer, referring to Lost. And in directing this spring's Star Trek, Abrams used time travel to reinvigorate a tired franchise.
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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 Caltrans District 7 Headquarters in Los Angeles that locals call the "Death Star"; the disjointed Cahill Center at Caltech; the mesh-covered science and art center at New York's Cooper Union.
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He's Facebook's strategic thinker on the next big thing in social media -- identity protection. The issue is who is going to set the standards for open-identity protocols that would enable you to safely take your online profile and relationships with you everywhere you go on the Internet. Dave Morin's team recently launched its own open-identity application, Facebook Connect.
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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. His goal, he says, was to create "a 360-degree panorama to replicate what you would see if you were walking down the street." Any street.
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As a kid, Susan Athey tagged along when her grandfather sold cattle at auction. She's now Microsoft's chief economist and a Harvard prof, asking grown-up versions of that question. Athey studies everything from government procurement to online ad sales.
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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.
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Autodesk, a world leader in design and engineering software best known for AutoCAD, is going long on sustainability, betting that its programs can make green building (and eventually manufacturing) effortless and ubiquitous. Danby is the company's first sustainable-design program manager, charged with leading the software development teams and driving the strategy aggressively across the company.
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He writes, directs, produces, acts, and scores -- Tyler Perry controls an entertainment empire. His seven films, which rarely cost more than $20 million, have grossed upward of $300 million combined -- four of them opened at No. 1 -- and sold 25 million DVDs. And last October, he made history, opening the first black-owned film studio in the United States.
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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 and turn it into a painting that sells for more than half a million dollars? Bill With Shark is a shrewd bit of philosophical and capitalist commentary: the once-voracious, aging Gates catching his own reflection and contemplating the work's title.
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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 Monsters vs. Aliens, Leonard says, "HP helped us eliminate the creative limitations of working in 3-D." The film is on target to gross more than $200 million.
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The high-fashion/mass-marketing movement seems to be reaching a new phase with Jil Sander's new project: The German designer has signed on as the creative director for Japanese retailer Uniqlo. Sander, who sold her namesake label in 2004, took on the clothing chain as her first consulting client, and then agreed to oversee its fall and winter collections.
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Last year, Dietrich Mateschitz's company sold 4 billion cans and pushed the category beyond $30 billion. All that has to do with creating what he calls a "cultural" company. From introducing the world's top skateboarders to Havana's underground skate scene to arranging a private jet to fly world-champion downhill skier Lindsey Vonn to a hand specialist after she cut a thumb tendon on a Champagne bottle.
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