On Monday, CNBC.com unveiled its famous NEXT LIST of 100 “entrepreneurs, financiers, inventors and executives who are working on innovative solutions to global challenges.”
Since this is an inherently subjective list, any patterns may point to nothing beyond the prejudices of those who compiled it. Nevertheless, here are five noteworthy features of the list.
1. About 20 percent of the 100 innovators were born outside the U.S.
Perhaps Silicon Valley and Wall Street are finally taking notice of foreign-born talent? Or maybe CNBC is an American company and 20% is actually too low? Perhaps the next 10 Mark Zuckerbergs will be Chinese?
The list features Robin Li and Jack Ma, China’s versions of Sergei Brin (search) and Jeff Bezos (e-commerce). Both men are still in their 40s – plenty of time left to innovate. “Ma’s Alibaba is China’s version of Amazon, eBay and a little bit of Google all rolled into one. Its evolution will impact billions of Chinese citizens,” the list authors write.
2. Several of the foreign-born disruptors are involved in the field of education.
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Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng founded Coursera, which brings online courses from the world’s best professors to anyone with an internet connection. Some can even be taken for credit. Rapelang Rabana of Botswana is the founder of Rekindle Learning, which uses mobile phones to deliver educational support at scale to classroom teachers via learning apps for students. Each company bridges the education gap between the first and third world, between educational haves and have-nots.
This category also features a much higher proportion of female founders. Go ladies!
3. Free is big business.
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A large percentage of those on the list attained their fame through services that are free to consumers and earn money through other methods, mostly advertising. These include Uri Levine and Ehud Shabtai, the Israeli co-founders of the crowdsourced driving app Waze; Jan Koum, founder of WhatsApp; Pete Cashmore, CEO and founder of Mashable; Dick Costolo, CEO of Twitter; and Daniel Ek, founder of Spotify.
But can so many businesses be sustained by advertising? When the venture capital dries up, will the free economy collapse under its own weight? This bubble in the making is particularly pronounced in the app economy where, it was recently reported, an estimated 75% of ads are merely advertising other apps.
Where’s the beef?
4. Elon Musk is your grandmother’s idea of a high-tech entrepreneur.
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As CEO of commercial space launch firm SpaceX and electric car company Tesla Motors, he’s what earlier generations envisioned when they pictured a really cool sci-fi future. When venture capitalist Peter Thiel lamented “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters,” he is referring to everyone but Elon Musk. Musk, Thiel and Max Levchin were all co-founders of PayPal, have invested in each others’ ventures over the years, and are all on CNBC’s list.
5. Our concept of innovation is somewhat anemic.
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Some of the commenters on the list point out that if these are the world’s innovators, our concept of innovation is somewhat anemic. “The innovation that happened after 1972 has been garbage,” one commenter writes. “It takes an ounce of brain to see the difference between companies like GE, Boeing, etc. and FB, Twitter, WhatsApp. I guess we live in a world where we honor companies that set up platforms for advertising products, not the companies that actually do research to solve problems of the world.”
Another commenter chimes in, “I’m somewhat surprised that the list contains so many names and companies that don’t make anything. It seems like the vast majority simply move money around or use other people’s money.”
Given these criticisms, let’s examine how many companies on the list “make something” in the old-fashioned sense? GoPro, Apple, 3D Robotics, SolarCity, Tesla…That’s at least 5 out of 100.
Most of the other companies, it seems, either provide financial services, e-commerce, social networking, or simply serve as a platform for distributing a good or service (and payment) through new channels. I’m not sure what it means that our notion of “innovation” consists of such things, but it’s food for thought. We wanted flying cars and we got…PayPal?
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