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Innovators have blazed a wide trail in American business over the past quarter-century. Some pioneered new industries, while others remade old businesses, creating jobs and enormous wealth while reenergizing the economy. Still others reformed entire countries, making way for U.S. products on distant shores. The ranks of these innovators included controversial extroverts and isolated visionaries, and hybrids of the two. They were loved and hated, lionized and -- in one case -- jailed. But each of them left a distinctive mark on the era.

1978 / FRED SMITH / Pioneering just-in-time delivery

By now, Fred Smith's notoriously poor grade (a "gentleman's C" at Yale) on a college paper detailing the prospects of an express air-freight service has become lore. Early on, everybody doubted him.

But by 1978, people were beginning to change their minds about Federal Express. As the company celebrated its seventh birthday, it developed a new information system that would be pivotal to its future. COSMOS -- for Customers, Operations and Services Master On-line Systems -- would become the backbone of FedEx's pioneering package-tracking system. By 1980, COSMOS would be rewritten for IBM computers, a milestone that would build the company's virtuoso reputation for juggling what would ultimately grow to 5 million packages each business day.

Smith had discovered that "the information about a package is as important as the delivery of the package itself." A Vietnam veteran, the no-nonsense chairman and CEO commands a worldwide labor force of more than 200,000 earning a collective $21 billion in revenue.

1979 / LEE IACOCCA / Winning first billion-dollar bailout

"In a year," reflects Lee Iacocca, "it'll be 25 years since I got fired at Ford."

So there have been bumps along the road. But no one had a better instinct for pairing new models and innovative promotions than this son of Italian immigrants.

He practically wrote the rules of the road for the automotive industry in the latter half of the 20th century. Not only was he dubbed the father of the Ford Mustang and the master of the Chrysler minivan, nobody could pitch a line like Iacocca. "If you find a better car," he intoned to a generation, "buy it."

Car buyers loved his moxie, and so did the federal government. In 1979, Iacocca, as chairman of ailing Chrysler, hit a home run for employees and shareholders and redefined turnaround by landing an unprecedented $1.5 billion in loan guarantees from a free-market government. (This precedent also made it easier for companies to turn to the government in times of crisis, as the airlines did last year after September 11.) After collecting the funds, Iacocca fulfilled his part by hawking products and rolling out new cars. Chrysler would pay off the public's note with the hard cash earned by innovation.

1980 \ TED TURNER \ Round-the-clock entrepreneur

Back in the late '70s, Ted Turner sized up the television market as "big and slow-footed."

So, in 1980, he leaped ahead of the broadcast industry by cobbling together a skeleton news staff and launching a brand-new business--24-hour cable news--virtually overnight. CNN would attract viewers from 150 countries with its constant broadcasts. It would ensure that shots, whether fired in Beijing or Kabul, would be heard around the world.

"The whole idea in business is to figure out something new if you can," Turner once told an interviewer, "or else build a whole lot better mousetrap and get it out, before your competitors can react."

1981 \ BILL GATES \ Creating technology for the masses

To some, Bill Gates is the Attila the Hun of computer software; if he can't buy it, he takes it by force of research and development. To his millions of followers, though, Gates is the quintessential gamesman, always one step ahead of consumers with a new system that is innovative but in reach of the masses.

In 1975, the Harvard dropout could barely afford a haircut. That year he teamed up with Paul Allen to start a company that would take three years to make it to the million-dollar revenue mark. In 1981, IBM debuted its first personal computer loaded with the entrepreneurs' product, MS-DOS. Armed with licensing rights to the disk operating system, Gates and Allen positioned their company, Microsoft, to become the master of cheap, functional operating systems at the dawn of the PC age.

The rest, as they say, is Microsoft history, topped by 95-percent market domination, antitrust suits and Windows XP--the current king of operating systems. By the time DOS bit the dust in the fall of 2001, the company whose growth it ignited was valued at $341 billion.

1982 \ TADASHI KUME \ Leading the world's auto industry

Back in 1974, when the El Dorado Cadillac gave new meaning to the term "gas hog," a young Honda engineer named Tadashi Kume stood nervously in front of Japanese company executives to exhibit plans for a little six-cylinder hatchback.

They hated it. "I remember their first reaction. They said: It has no trunk!" recalled Kume years later.

Americans, though, had a different opinion of the car, which the company would roll out as the Accord. The gas miser went on to become one of the most popular lines in auto history, and it went a long way to making Honda a major player. Eight years later, as Honda's president, Kume would open its first American plant, in Marysville, Ohio. Tooled up to produce Accords, the first Japanese-transplant auto factory would lead dozens of other vehicle manufacturers and suppliers to American shores. Foreign carmakers such as Nissan, Toyota and later BMW and Hyundai followed Kume's lead. And instead of innovating only in their home countries, Honda and the other transplants would turn the U.S. into the world's automotive nerve center by designing and engineering a new generation of cutting-edge cars in America for Americans--trunks included.

1983 \ DENG XIAOPING \

Capitalism with Chinese characteristics

Determination is a crucial ingredient for any innovator. It's a characteristic that helped China's de facto CEO invent a brand-new governing system for the world's largest country. In 1978, Deng Xiaoping returned to power in Beijing from political banishment, determined to establish a new economic order. He started in the rural areas -- where 80 percent of Chinese then lived--by abolishing agricultural communes and replacing them with family farms. This helped reward hard workers: the more one delivered, the more money one made. Deng also began allowing farms to sell excess products on the free market.

By 1983, results of the economic reforms were spectacular. China's food production more than doubled between 1978 and 1983, and Deng began foisting on state-owned enterprises much the same approach that had worked on farms--allowing plant operators to line up their own suppliers and find buyers for their own goods. At the same time, he opened doors, just a crack at first, to foreign businesses. At least 2,000 foreign investors had put money into China by 1984.

By the time Deng died in 1997, his moves had turned China into the dream market of thousands of foreign CEOs unable to resist the thought of selling to 1.2 billion consumers.

1984 \ STEVE JOBS \ Recognizing a good idea

For Steve Jobs, innovation has always been about finding cool new technology and introducing it to primed consumers. If Jobs couldn't invent new technology, he engineered improvements. In 1976, Jobs co-founded Apple Computer to make personal computers for the masses. By 1984, the reclusive visionary reinvented the PC with the launch of the Macintosh, a personal computer that pioneered simple graphical signs users could click on to complete tasks. When Apple was caught napping--as it was with the introduction of CD burners by such competitors as Compaq--Jobs would spur R&D to leapfrog the competition with something better.

Jobs announced plans to leave Apple in 1985 "to get on with my life," he told a company board meeting, but he couldn't stay away. In 1996, he returned as the firm's "interim CEO." He later took the mantle officially, and still holds it today.

1985 \ PHIL KNIGHT \ Recreating marketing

As a runner for University of Oregon track coach Bill Bowerman, Phil Knight learned how to put his heart into a 100-yard dash. But when the two co-founded Nike with a bit more than $1,000 in the early '60s, they were off and running on one of America's most successful business marathons.

Bowerman provided some of the company's early shoe designs, including the waffle sole, and Knight provided the marketing genius.

The distinctive swoosh logo came in 1971, a student-made design. A lineup of star athletes--and a catchy slogan, "Just Do It"--branded Nike on consumers' consciousness and generated unheard-of sales.