Photograph by Kevin A. Roberts
Innovation has nothing to do with how many R&D dollars you have,” the late Steve Jobs told Fortune in 1998, shortly after returning to the company he’d founded more than two decades earlier. “When Apple came up with the Mac, IBM was spending at least 100 times more on R&D. It’s not about money. It’s about the people you have, how you’re led, and how much you get it.”
And he got it. Three years later, “iPod” entered the American lexicon. The iPhone and iPad followed, as did the world. Just a couple of months before Jobs resigned as CEO in late August, Apple was proclaimed the world’s most valuable consumer-facing brand.
Like Jobs, the 16 people profiled in this month’s cover story didn’t spend millions on R&D when they first launched their endeavors. They started with a simple idea: serve fine dining without the formality; find a more efficient way to heat and cool a building; help those with brain injuries by merging technology with neurology. Some focused their efforts on the arts, whether by fusing new media, breaking the ice for women composers, or launching a truly community-minded festival. Others enhanced the landscape, using such fundamentals as light and sound. In every case, the results advanced these pioneers’ fields and shaped the world around them.
Among those who’ve left their fingerprints on St. Louis, however, few have left such a mark as the late sculptor Bob Cassilly. Out-of-towners might be automatically drawn to the Arch and Busch Stadium, but it’s the imaginative work of Cassilly’s City Museum—caves shaped like
dragons, slides that plummet seven stories, a yellow school bus straddling a roof’s ledge—that remains etched in visitors’ memories years later. Sightseers at the Saint Louis Zoo are likely to recall the giant cement turtles of Turtle Park along the wildlife park’s south edge as vividly as they remember the critters inside. Cassilly had a way of seeing the world that didn’t require a team of researchers and developers—in fact, he often bucked mainstream logic, insisting that a children’s museum in the 21st century doesn’t require fast-paced movies or touch-screen computers.
It requires only a good idea.
Perhaps Apple put it best in a grainy black-and-white commercial that aired in 1997, on the cusp of the company’s reemergence as a technological giant: “Here’s to the crazy ones. The rebels. The ones who see things differently... While some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.”
