The Top 25 Innovators & Entrepreneurs

Meet the new pioneers of Washington's idea factory.

By Leslie D. Helm, Randy Woods, John Stang, Talia Schmidt and Kate Vesper | November 2009 | FROM THE PRINT EDITION

Photo by John Keatley

Innovation is like a flu virus. Once someone catches it, it spreads, mutates, until eventually it touches everyone. Some get the bug more seriously than others, but no one can deny its existence.

Washington state caught the bug years ago when Bill Boeing decided to build new flying machines in Seattle. But more recently, a critical mass of innovators and entrepreneurs in every industry from software and manufacturing to retailing, entertainment and consumer products has thrust Washington into the spotlight as a hotbed of innovation.

The Top 25 Innovators & Entrepreneurs are Seattle Business magazine's annual celebration of some of these new pioneers leading the rest of us forward. In a time of accelerating change in business, these innovators will lead the charge tomorrow.

1. Working Backward

Entrepreneur of the Year: Jeff Bezos

CEO, chairman, Amazon.com Inc., Seattle

Amazon.com's Jeff Bezos innovates by first listening to his customers

When Jeff Bezos first launched Amazon.com 15 years ago, plenty of analysts saw it as a company with little potential for growth. After all, how much money can you really make selling books? But Bezos confounded his skeptics by continuously re-inventing the business. Today, it's arguably the world's leading online retailer, selling everything from groceries to electronics.

And Bezos is just beginning. The guy who changed the way we thought about bookstores keeps opening up new frontiers. The Kindle, Amazon's electronic reading device, is changing the way we look at reading. And with its approach to "cloud computing," a set of new web-based services that enable customers to operate their software on Amazon's computer systems, paying only for the computer power they actually use, Amazon is changing the face of information technology.

This year, analysts expect the company to earn more than $750 million, up nearly 400 percent from 2006, on sales of more than $22 billion. And Amazon is worth $40 billion, giving Bezos a personal net worth of more than $8 billion. He will soon move his company from its perch on a hill above Seattle to a new campus in South Lake Union which, when completed in 2012, will have 10 buildings capable of housing 8,000 employees.

How does Bezos keep introducing major new innovations at Amazon? The typical approach, he says, is to take the skills you have and use them as the basis for offering a new product or service. That's what Amazon did with cloud computing, taking a computer infrastructure the business developed internally