Will there be another?

It's a bit absurd to try to identify "the next Steve Jobs." Two decades ago, Mr. Jobs himself wouldn't even have qualified. Exiled from Apple Inc., Mr. Jobs was then hoping to revive his struggling computer maker, NeXT Inc.

But just as Mr. Jobs followed Henry Ford and Thomas Edison, there will some day be another innovator with the vision, drive and disdain of the status quo to spark, and then direct, big changes in how we live.

Mr. Jobs himself inspired legions of entrepreneurs. Any one of those who can improve the efficiency of the world's energy or health-care systems could ultimately have a Jobs-like impact.

"You have to try the unreasonable," says Vinod Khosla, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems Inc., who, as a longtime venture capitalist, has seen thousands of would-be revolutionaries. Two key characteristics, Mr. Khosla says: "unbridled confidence and arrogance."

Timing helps. Another venture capitalist, Arthur Patterson of Accel Partners, notes that Mr. Jobs's 12-year hiatus from Apple coincided with a period of relative stasis in information technology. When Mr. Jobs returned in 1997, the Internet had begun to transform the industry, and beyond.

Mr. Patterson is among many who sees parallels to Mr. Jobs in Facebook Inc. founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg. (Accel is in an investor in Facebook.)

Like Mr. Jobs, Mr. Zuckerberg dropped out of college, created a product that users didn't know they wanted, and made it indispensable to their lives. He is a perfectionist, and sometimes prickly. Joel Peterson, the chairman of JetBlue Airways Corp. and a professor at Stanford University's Graduate School of Business, calls such people "productive narcissists."

Another quality that makes it hard to forecast Mr. Jobs's successor as innovator-in-chief: his ability to rebound and learn from his setbacks. By his own admission, the Steve Jobs who returned to Apple in 1997 was very different from the Steve Jobs who left in 1985.

To predict if Mr. Zuckerberg will be the next Steve Jobs, "You have to predict [Mr.] Zuckerberg's maturity" over time, says Jeffrey Pfeffer, another Stanford business professor.

Any list of candidates to be the "next Steve Jobs" is sure to spark an argument, sometimes from the nominees themselves. "There's no Steve Jobs before Steve Jobs, and no Steve Jobs after Steve Jobs," Masayoshi Son, founder and CEO of Japan's Softbank Corp. said on Friday.

In Japan, Mr. Son draws Jobs-likes comparisons for his restlessness, entrepreneurial spirit and challenges to established players such as Nippon Telegraph & Telephone. In 2008, Mr. Son convinced Apple to launch the iPhone in Japan with Softbank, rather than the much larger NTT DoCoMo Inc..

In China, technologists worry that the country isn't spawning innovative disrupters. Jack Ma, the CEO of Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., is something of an exception, with some Jobs-like characteristics.

Alibaba's online marketplace connects consumers to consumers like eBay Inc., and China's vast network of small businesses with a global web of customers and suppliers. Mr. Ma fought off larger rivals like eBay and Yahoo Inc.; now he muses aloud about buying Yahoo.

Along the way, the fiery Mr. Ma built a strong cult of personality inside the company. He also challenged China's lagging state-owned banks with online payment and lending systems. "If banks don't change, we will change banks," he said recently.

Outside of technology, Stanford biologist Drew Endy draws intriguing parallels to Mr. Jobs.

Mr. Endy heads the non-profit BioBricks Foundation, which aims to make, and then distribute freely, DNA tools to make it easier and cheaper to create artificial life forms. He envisions living cells that can be programmed as readily as silicon computer circuits today.

But Mr. Endy also has a business side, as a serial entrepreneur who is no stranger to failure. He was a co-founder of Codon Devices Inc., a high-profile synthetic biology startup that failed in 2009 after burning through more than $33 million. "Codon crashed and burned wonderfully," Mr. Endy said.

Now, he's trying to follow Mr. Jobs in learning from his mistakes. He's a director of Gen9, another synthetic biology start-up, which has intentionally maintained a lower profile.

For now, though, Mr. Jobs's nearest analog might be one of Apple's emerging rivals, Amazon.com Inc. CEO Jeff Bezos.

The company he started in 1994 to sell books via the Internet has transformed both publishing and retailing. Just four years after Amazon introduced its Kindle in 2007, electronic books now outsell print books on the site. With products from digital movies furniture to diapers, Amazon is now the nation's 19th largest retailer. And its network of warehouses—once derided as folly by some investors—lets Amazon seamlessly put those packages on America's doorsteps within days of a mouse click.

Like Mr. Jobs, Mr. Bezos continually pushes Amazon in new directions. Its network is so vast and efficient that Amazon has a thriving business renting computer time to other companies. Just last week, Amazon introduced a new version of the Kindle to challenge Apple's iPad tablet computer.

Mr. Bezos is both the CEO and deeply immersed in the details. In an interview last week, he said he insisted that Amazon's tablets greet customers by name the first time they are turned on.

"He brings unbelievable empathy for what customers want, be they individuals or enormous companies, and an incredible ability to zoom in from the biggest concept to the smallest detail," says former Amazon executive David Risher.

Outside of Amazon, Mr. Bezos has funded Blue Origin, which is developing manned spacecrafts. Like Mr. Jobs's black turtlenecks, Mr. Bezos has his own signature wardrobe: blue jeans, light blue shirt and dark blazer. He told an interviewer in 2001 the monotony saved him the time of worrying what to wear each day.

Sydney Finkelstein, a professor at Dartmouth College's Tuck School of Business, calls Mr. Bezos, "the natural contender to throne as America's most dynamic CEO."

Adopted from The Wall Street Journal