The Takeda Foundation, is an organisation based in Japan. In 2001 it launched an annual awards program, which presented awards accompanied by 100 million yen under the categories social/economic well-being, individual/humanity well-being, and world environmental well-being.
Awardees within each category are listed in alphabetical order.
The technical achievement honored by the Takeda Award 2001 Techno-Entrepreneurial Achievements for Social/Economic Well-Being was "the origination and the advancement of open development models for system software - open architecture, free software and open source software."
| Ken Sakamura (University of Tokyo) | For developing and promoting the TRON open architecture, a real-time operating system specification for embedded systems | |
| Richard Stallman (Free Software Foundation) | For starting the free software movement and leading the development of the GNU operating system | |
| Linus Torvalds (Transmeta Corporation) | For developing the Linux operating system kernel by the open source process for software development |
The technical achievement honored by the Takeda Award 2001 Techno-Entrepreneurial Achievements for Individual/Humanity Well-Being was "development of a large-scale genome sequencing system by establishing 'the whole genome shotgun strategy' that utilizes modularized data acquisition system and high-throughput DNA sequencers."
| Michael W. Hunkapiller (Applied Biosystems) | For his contribution to the development of the automated high-throughput DNA sequencers and the promotion of the foundation of Celera Genomics | |
| J. Craig Venter (Celera Genomics) | For the foundation of Celera Genomics and the development of "the whole genome shotgun strategy". |
The technical achievement honored by the Takeda Award 2001 Techno-Entrepreneurial Achievements for World Environmental Well-Being is "the development and promotion of the Ecological Rucksacks and Material Input per Unit Service (MIPS) concepts, as measures of the ecological stress of products and services."
| Friedrich Schmidt-Bleek (Factor 10 Institute) | for developing and promoting the Ecological Rucksacks and Material Input per Unit of Service (MIPS) concepts. | |
| Ernst Ulrich von Weizsäcker (Founding President of the Wuppertal Institute) | For his contribution in refining and promoting the Ecological Rucksacks and Material Input per Unit Service (MIPS) concepts. |
The awards were suspended in 2003 due to financial constraints, with the hope that they could be restarted if/when the Takeda Foundation's financial situation improves.[1]
As well as the above awards, also in 2001 and 2002 they presented the Techno-Entrepreurship Award, and the Takeda Scholarship Award.
| Isamu Akasaki (Meijo University) (25%) | For development of the blue light-emitting diode and blue laser diode |
| Hiroshi Amano (Meijo University) (25%) | |
| Shuji Nakamura (University of California, Santa Barbara) (50%) |
| Patrick O. Brown (Stanford University, Howard Hughes Medical Institute) | For development and promotion of DNA microarrays |
| Stephen P. A. Fodor (Affymetrix) |
| Charles Elachi (Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology) | For development of Spaceborne Microwave Radar for Monitoring the Global Environment |
| Nobuyoshi Fugono (Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International) | |
| Ken'ichi Okamoto (Osaka Prefecture University) |