ICON magazine has a good review of the 21 most influential people who are changing the contemporary design landscape and products, organisations and ideas that everyone will be copying in the immediate future:

Ikea is first...then it's Rapid prototyping, Easyjet, Milan, Design Academy Eindhoven...Alice Rawsthorne, Copying, Bouroullec Brothers, Blogs, Midsummer Light, Light Transmitting Concrete, the Readymade, South Korea, Rei Kawakubo, Ora Ito, Naoto Fukasawa, Entropy, Nintendo DS, Dunne & Raby, Murray Moss and Yves Behar.

Pretty europeans + asians as it seems when it's about citing people. But the trends (blog, copy, rapid prototyping) are much more transnational/occidental. I think this classification is a bit too... cosy, it needs more dirty/rebel stuff as claimed by Laurie Anderson about virtual environment at that time ("let's put dirt in virtual reality"). I mean I/we are interested into how people hack objects, find tricks or to re-use situationist terminology "détourne" artifacts. I would have definitely added "détournement" as an influential trend!