Innovator: Cyber Guardian Adam Hildreth

In 1999, Adam Hildreth, then 14, and six friends in Leeds, England, started a virtual world for teens called Dubit. The site took off and at one point Dubit needed to employ 50 monitors to keep cyberbullies and other troublemakers in check. Human moderation "was never going to scale," he says.

Hildreth, who dropped out of high school two years later to run Dubit full-time, began developing software to address the problem. The idea became his next company, Crisp Thinking, which he co-founded in 2005 while remaining a shareholder in Dubit. Crisp's software analyzes users' language and actions to identify harassment, spamming, or predators on the lookout for victims. The system reacts in real time to warn or ban people who misbehave—or refer them to human moderators.