Innovator

Though Shepard spent only 5 minutes in actual space aboard Freedom 7, he laid the groundwork for the United States to become the great innovator in space exploration we know today.

Tom was an innovator.

Tom is an innovator.

Tom is the best innovator at our company.

Described by the judging panel as a "Swiss army knife of the 21st century", Apache Hadoop picked up the innovator of the year award for having the potential to change the face of media innovations.

Competition gets thinner still when it comes to the 00s: Animal Collective and Joanna Newsom do one thing very well, Gaga and MIA are aggregators not innovators. Björk is peerless.

We now have good reason to question the pursuits of the vaunted innovators with whom Liu consorted in California – the blissed-out cultists at Google, whose only worry is over “the wrong kind of sparkling water in the microkitchens”, or the manic experts who specialise in “envisioning hyperplanes in n-dimensional space”.