An innovator in a general sense, is a person or an organization who is one of the first to introduce into reality something better than before. That often opens up a new area for others and achieves an innovation.

Some people that are often called innovators include:

Mariana Mazzucato (born June 16, 1968) is an Italian-born economist and academic.

Mazzucato spent most of her life in the United States before returning to Europe in 2000. Muzzucato gained a Bachelor of Arts in History and Economics from Tufts University, Boston in 1990, a Masters in Economics from the New School for Social Research, New York City in 1994 and a PhD in Economics, also from the New School in 1997. She is RM Phillips Professor of Science and Technology at the University of Sussex (SPRU) and Visiting Professor in the Economics of Innovation at The Open University (UK). After receiving her PhD, she became Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Denver in 1997.

She is currently the Coordinator of a 3 year European Commission FP7 project on Finance, Innovation and Growth (FINNOV, 2009–2012) and Economics Director of the ESRC Centre for Social and Economic Research on Innovation in Genomics (Innogen). She is Deputy Director of the Open University's inter-faculty centre on Innovation, Knowledge and Development (IKD), which she directed from 2004-2009. From 2007-2009 she was Visiting Professor at the Bocconi University in Milan. She is also a Research Associate of the UK based DEMOS think tank.

Chubb Rock (born Richard Simpson on May 28, 1968 in Kingston, Jamaica) is a New York-based rapper who released several commercially successful hip hop albums in the early 1990s. A former National Merit Scholar, Chubb Rock was a pre-med student who dropped out of Brown University to pursue his musical career.

Discovered and produced by his first cousin DJ / Producer Howie Tee, Chubb Rock first appeared on the national scene with his 1988 self-titled debut "Chubb Rock" and 1989's "And the winner is..." The latter produced the minor hit "Ya Bad Chubbs" which garnered air play on Yo! MTV Raps during that time.

His 1991 release entitled The One, reached #13 on Billboard's "Top Hip-Hop/R&B" chart for that year. Three singles from that release, "Treat'em Right", "Just The Two Of Us" and "The Chubbster", made it to #1 on Billboard's "Top Rap Single" chart list for the same year.

The following year saw the release of I Gotta Get Mine Yo, a release which features guest performances from Grand Puba Maxwell and Poke. This release also helped fledgling music producers Trackmasters, on their rise to prominence, as they handled production duties on the recording. Chubb Rock also makes an appearance on MC Serch's 1992 song, "Back to The Grill."

Jack Dorsey (born November 19, 1976) is an American software architect and businessman widely known as the creator of Twitter and as the founder and CEO of Square, a mobile payments company. In 2008, he was named to the MIT Technology Review TR35 as one of the top 35 innovators in the world under the age of 35.

Dorsey grew up in St. Louis, Missouri, and by age 13, he had become interested in dispatch routing. Some of the open source software he created in the area of dispatch logistics is still used by many taxi cab companies. He went to high school at Bishop DuBourg High School and attended the Missouri University of Science and Technology before subsequently transferring to New York University, where he first conceived the idea for Twitter.

While working on dispatching as a programmer he later moved to California.

In Oakland in 2000, Dorsey started his company to dispatch couriers, taxis, and emergency services from the Web. His other projects and ideas at this time included networks of medical devices and a "frictionless service market". In July 2000, building on dispatching and inspired in part by LiveJournal and possibly by AOL Instant Messenger, he had the idea for a Web-based realtime status/short message communication service.