innovator

plural innovators · alternative obsolete rare innovatour

1. Someone who innovates; a creator of new ideas.

   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.

   2011 July 4, Simon Reynolds, “Is Björk the last great pop innovator?”, in The Guardian, →ISSN

   2 more examples

   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.

   2011 March 25, Maria Winckler, “Apache Hadoop takes top prize at Media Guardian Innovation Awards”, in The Guardian

   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”.

   2020 April 7, Peter Conrad, “Abolish Silicon Valley by Wendy Liu review – rebooting our reality”, in The Guardian

2. businessAn early adopter.