DENSO Accepts IEEE Corporate Innovation Award for QR Code

DENSO Corporation accepted the IEEE Corporate Innovation Award during a May 5 ceremony in Atlanta. IEEE, the largest international association for electrical and electronic engineering, awarded DENSO for developing the QR Code and spreading its use globally, enabling the world to benefit from its numerous capabilities.

The IEEE Corporate Innovation Award, one of the most prestigious technical awards in the world, is presented to organizations that have made a significant global impact with innovative technologies and products and contributed to the development of electrical and electronic engineering.

The QR Code was developed in 1994 by DENSO’s applied equipment engineering group (currently DENSO WAVE) as an easy-to-read code that can store large amounts of information. The innovative two-dimensional code can store about 200 times more information than barcodes and can be read at high speed. DENSO started to use the code mainly for inventory management at its manufacturing plants, and later made the patent available free of charge, allowing it to spread globally. In the early 2000s, the QR Code became more familiar to the general public as the use of mobile phones with cameras grew. Today, it is widely used in many daily life applications, including electronic tickets and cashless payments. In 2020, the QR Code was recognized as an IEEE Milestone for its outstanding contribution to the world.

To help commemorate that the company invented the QR Code nearly 30 years ago, DENSO recently launched a free online game — DENSO QR Code Maze — and created a new webpage on its North America website detailing the QR Code’s history and the IEEE honor.

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