INNOVATION is the grease in the economic engine, the sparkle that keeps culture fresh and the key ingredient in nearly every billion-dollar fortune. To kick off our yearlong series of special reports celebrating America’s 250th birthday, we present the men and women who best embody that creative spirit. All of them are in the mold of the quintessential American innovator, Thomas Edison. That means they aren’t just inventors; they’re business leaders who bring their breakthroughs to market, transforming entire industries and creating new ones.
To identify the top 250 living innovators (a list of the 250 greatest historic ones can be found here), we first tapped the expertise of Forbes’ beat reporters, who nominated nearly a thousand candidates. We ran those names by a panel of world-class judges—including Jim Breyer, founder of Breyer capital; tech journalist Kara Swisher; and innovation expert Rita McGrath—who ranked them based on creativity, breadth, engagement, disruption and commercial impact. Then we fed the results into the most revolutionary innovation of our time—artificial intelligence—asking both ChatGPT and Gemini to rank them according to the same criteria. Taking all this into account, Forbes editors then determined the final ranking.
Progress, an inherent innovation corollary, continues. More than one-third of our ranking consists of women and people of color. That’s vastly more than would have appeared, using the same methodology, 50 years ago at America’s bicentennial and surely fewer than will appear at our tricentennial. Capital, however slowly, chases talent, wherever and whoever it is. Every person here is an American citizen, though many weren’t born that way. The United States is a nation of immigrants, and this list reflects that, starting at the very top.
Innovator 250 Judges: Jim Breyer, founder, Breyer Capital; Ken Frazier, former CEO, Merck; Sonia Gardner, cofounder, Avenue Capital Group; Monica Jones, CEO, National Inventors Hall of Fame; Rich Karlgaard, former publisher, Forbes; Michael Kitces, head of planning strategy, Focus Partners Wealth; Mike Mayo, managing director, Wells Fargo Securities; Rita McGrath, academic director in executive education, Columbia Business School; Katie Rae, managing partner, Engine Ventures; Kara Swisher, podcaster and editor at large, New York magazine; Josh Wolfe, cofounder, Lux Capital.
Innovator 250 reported by: Asia Alexander, Dan Alexander, Emily Baker-White, Matt Craig, Amy Feldman, Maria Gracia Santillana Linares, Zoya Hasan, Jessica Jacolbe, Jeff Kauflin, Sergei Klebnikov, Brett Knight, Brandon Kochkodin, Luisa Kroll, Randall Lane, Phoebe Liu, Katherine Love, Iain Martin, Simone Melvin, Janet Novack, Alan Ohnsman, John Paczkowski, Matt Schifrin, Katharine Schwab, Michael Solomon, Chloe Sorvino, Giacomo Tognini, Anna Tong, Hank Tucker and Will Yakowicz.
Art Director, Editorial Operations: Charles Brucaliere
Editorial Design: Philip Smith, Yunjia Yuan, Macy Sinreich
Photo Research: Gail Toivanen
Product Enablement Lead: Juman Nidal
Product: Traci Kalamajka, Sophie Richards
Product Design Adrienne Michalski, Sara Amato
Engineering: Tay Buley, Diab Al Sadi, Ahmad Abdelraheem, Ahmad Alshawakri
QA: Gevorg Arakelyan, Kristine Karapetyan
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