QR codes were actually invented by Toyota supplier Denso

Quick response (QR) codes just seemed to appear one day in the late 2000s. Now they’re everywhere. But QR codes were designed for manufacturing, not marketing. It was Denso, the Japanese industrial giant closely linked with Toyota, that developed the code in the early Nineties. Companies in the car industries had to manage a large variety of parts and were required to store more information on one product in their system. That caused a decline in the efficiency at factories, as workers had to scan barcodes more frequently, which was difficult and fatiguing.