BusinessWeek recently did a piece called The 85 Most Disruptive Ideas in Our History, which annoyed me because they didn't present them in chronological order, so here they are:

1930 Refrigeration
1933 Fixed-rate Mortgage
1934 TV
1935 Social Security
1936 Name-brand Jeans
1937 Whiteboard
1937 GDP
1937 IS-LM
1940 The Jeep
1941 The Manhattan Project
1941 Teenage Consumers
1946 Venture Capital
1947 Polaroid
1947 AK-47
1947 Microchips
1948 Contact Lenses
1948 Barcode
1948 Information Theory
1950 Credit
1954 Kitty Litter
1954 McDonald's
1955 Parkinson's Law
1956 Shipping Container
1956 Corporate Campus
1956 The Organization Man
1957 High-fructose Corn Syrup
1958 The Jet Engine
1959 Motown
1959 Modem
1959 Commercial Infant Formula
1960 The Pill
1960 OPEC
1962 Wal-Mart
1964 Southern Strategy
1965 Singapore
1965 Green Revolution
1967 The Super Bowl
1968 The Cubicle
1970 Securitization
1970 Shadow Banking
1970 Shareholder Value
1970 Workplace Safety
1971 Starbucks
1971 E-mail
1972 Atari
1973 Black-Scholes Model
1973 Telecommuting
1974 Laffer Curve
1975 Free Agency
1975 Billable Hours
1975 Hollywood Blockbusters
1976 VCR
1976 Apple
1976 Sexual Harrassment
1977 Bottled Water
1978 Outsourcing
1978 The 401(k)
1979 ESPN
1979 One Child Policy
1980 Cable News
1982 Personal Fitness
1983 GPS
1984 Sportswear
1985 Air Jordans
1986 Perestroika
1987 PowerPoint
1988 Global Warming
1988 Al-Qaeda
1989 Junk Bonds
1991 Open Source
1993 HTML
1994 Amazon.com
1995 eBay
1997 The Innovator's Dilemma
1998 High-frequency Trading
1998 Google
1999 Napster
1999 The Euro
2000 Gay Marriage
2000 DNA Sequencing
2003 The Poverty Lab
2004 Facebook
2005 YouTube
2006 Twitter
2007 Smartphone