DENSO Receives IEEE Corporate Innovation Award for Developing and Spreading Use of QR Code

DENSO Corporation announced it has received the IEEE Corporate Innovation Award from IEEE, the largest international association for electrical and electronic engineering in the world, for developing the QR Code and spreading its use globally.

The IEEE Corporate Innovation Award 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 section (currently DENSO WAVE) as an easy-to-read code that can store a large amount 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, enabling it to spread globally. In the early 2000s, the QR Code became familiar to the general public in line with the growing use of mobile phones equipped with cameras. 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*3 for its outstanding contribution.

Even 28 years after it was invented, the QR Code continues to evolve with the addition of new functions. DENSO WAVE developed SQRC,*4 which can carry two types of data (public and private) in a single code, Face Authentication SQRC, which can turn facial feature points into a QR Code, and Frame QR,*5 which offers design flexibility. The QR Code is contributing to personal identification, prevention of counterfeiting and information falsification, and generation of electronic tickets.