Note: this piece is part of a larger article on the winners of Wired Magazine's 2007 Rave Awards. The other winners were Tim Kring, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., The Allen Brain Atlas, Brian K. Vaughn, Cliff Bleszinski & Tim Sweeney, Alfonso Cuarón, Arianna Huffington, Gregg Gillis, Walter De'Silva, Jen Chung, WorldVista, Michael Wesch, Mark Shuttleworth and Arnold Schwarzenegger.

To find the 22 innovators, instigators and inventors to honor with a Rave Award this year, we started by looking for the most intriguing breakthroughs in the world today -- then tracked down the individuals who made them happen. Each honoree told a unique story, but they tended to have one thing in common: Before changing the game in technology, business, or culture, they first changed themselves. There's the actor who became a politician (Arnold Schwarzenegger) and the politician who became an entrepreneur (Arianna Huffington), not to mention an entrepreneur turned philanthropist (Paul Allen) and a philanthropist turned source warrior (Mark Shuttleworth). The lesson seems obvious: Reinvent yourself, reinvent the world.

The Mogul
J.K. Rowling
Harry Potter, Inc.

In 1990, before the rise of Second Life and World of Warcraft, before the triumph of MMORPGs, a young woman named Joanne Rowling was stuck on a delayed four-hour train ride to King's Cross station in London. She began to conjure up an outcast boy heading to a sorcery school called Hogwarts. Seven years and countless drafts later, the first Harry Potter novel plunged readers into a parallel universe more compelling than any online world imaginable. Rowling was paid a $4,000 advance. Today she is the first person to become a billionaire by writing books. And when "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows," the seventh and final volume in the series, apparates on July 21, it will mark the conclusion of an incredible run: more than 325 million books sold in 200 countries, not to mention the $3 billion or so earned by the first four movies and billions more from games, action figures, and product tie-ins. Rowling is the reigning master of what you might call MMFWs-massively multireader fictional worlds-inspiring a generation of screen-fed kids to devour old-fashioned books on paper.

Page created 21 April 2007; last updated 21 April 2007.