Mumbai: Wipro''s Azim Premji and Bangladesh`s micro-credit pioneer, Nobel laureate Mohammad Yusuf are among the all-time great 30 entrepreneurs identified by the US-based Business Week.

They report places them in the same league as Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Benjamin Franklin, and modern day greats like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Michael Dell.

The list includes:
Zheng He (1371-1433)
Benjamin Franklin (1706- 1790)
Mayer Amschel Rothschild (1744-1812)
John Jacob Astor (1763- 1848)
John D. Rockefeller (1839-1937)
Thomas Edison (1847-1931)
Milton Hershey (1857-1945)
W K Kellogg (1860-1951)
Joseph Horn (1861-1941)
Frank Hardart (1850-1918)
Henry Ford (1863-1947)
Ray Kroc (1902-1984)
Madam C J Walker (1867-1919)
Estee Lauder (1907-2004)
Ernest Gallo (1909-2007)
Thomas Watson Sr (1874-1956)
Thomas Watson Jr. (1914-1993)
Sam Walton (1918-1992)
Earl Graves (born 1935)
Andy Grove (1936)
Ralph Lauren (1939)
Martha Stewart (1941)
Steve Jobs (1955)
Jeff Bezos (1964)
Michael Dell (1965) and
Pierre Omidyar (1967)

Premji is cited Business Week for the way he turned Wipro''s struggling business that he inherited from his father at the age of 21 into a leading IT company in India and growing player in the global market, speaks volumes of his business acumen.

"He put a premium on quality and standards to build a reputation for Wipro that would reassure western companies hesitant to move services overseas, a move that helped him land clients like General Electric. Premji is also a hands-on manager involved in day-to-day operations, even making sales calls himself," it says.

Premji, the magazine notes, built a leading IT company as the industry was growing and he expanded into the global market by adhering to rigorous standards.

The selection
Business Week says it "picked the brains" of professors, authors and its own staffers to compile the list.

The criterion was simple: if they had the vision to create new markets or tap into underserved markets, changing the way people lived in the process, they were candidates for the honour. But still it agreed that the list is subjective.

Some founders won recognition not just for their companies` success, but for what they did with the wealth they accumulated. Jeff Cornwall, director of the Centre for Entrepreneurship at Belmont University, entrepreneurs-turned- philanthropists like Andrew Carnegie and Bill Gates made the top of this list.

Many of the pioneers chosen also created businesses that in turn encouraged others to start their own enterprises.

About Yunus, the magazine stated that the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize winner founded a banking system 30 years ago to lend small amounts of money to the rural poor in Bangladeshi villages.

"Most of the low-interest microloans go to women, who use them to start their own profit-making enterprises, mainly in agriculture, crafts, or services," it stated.

"Grameen Bank now has 2,422 branches, employs more than 20,000 people, and has loaned more than $6 billion since its founding. Borrowers own most of the equity in the bank. The company has been profitable in all but three years since it was founded."