The Economist Honors Innovation At the Inaugural Innovation Awards and Summit in San Francisco

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The Economist Honors Innovation At the Inaugural Innovation Awards and Summit in San Francisco

Awards Given to Individuals Driving Recent Innovation in Bioscience,

Communications, Computing, Energy and the Environment, and Nanotechnology

CALIFORNIA, SAN FRANCISCO, Sep. 18 -/E-Wire/Business Wire/-- The Economist tonight will honor the achievements of six innovation leaders, at the conclusion of the inaugural Economist Innovation Awards and Summit at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco.

At a ceremony this evening, awards will be presented to individuals driving leadership and value through innovation in bioscience, communications, computing, energy and the environment, and nanotechnology. A surprise sixth "no boundaries" award will also be presented. The judging committee, chaired by Nick Valery, the editor of The Economist Technology Quarterly, relied on specialized knowledge in each of the categories and used three main criteria to select the final award winner.

"It gives us great pleasure to bring together here so many individuals from the corporate, academic, and financial worlds who have taken ideas quite literally from the cocktail napkin to the marketplace," says Valery. "These are the people who bring the pages of The Economist to life. It is time to recognize and thank them for their enormous contribution."

Award winners hail from around the world, but The Economist chose to launch its awards program in San Francisco. "The Bay Area and San Francisco long have been hailed as centers of innovation," said Valery. "The region has the diverse brain power, creativity, idealism and ambition to turn new ideas into profitable revenue streams."

The Economist recognizes the following innovation leaders for revolutionizing the way business is done and spawning new markets:

-- Bioscience, Human Genome Mapping: Leroy Hood MD, President and Director, The Institute for Systems Biology

-- Communications, CDMA: Irwin Mark Jacobs, Chairman and CEO, QUALCOMM Incorporated

-- Computing, Java: James Gosling, Vice President and Fellow, Sun Microsystems

-- Energy and the Environment, Common Rail Diesel Engine: Rinaldo Rinolfi, Executive Vice-President, Fiat Research Center

-- Nanotechnology, GeneChip(R)technology: Stephen Fodor, Chairman and CEO, Affymetrix Inc.

-- "No Boundaries", Blue-Violet Laser: Shuji Nakamura, Professor, Materials and Director, Center for Solid State Lighting and Displays, University of California-Santa Barbara (UCSB)

Award candidates were nominated based on their effect on a marketplace or the creation of a new market; impact on an emerging branch of science and technology; and impact on revenue of the sponsoring organization or enterprise over the past decade. Nominations were solicited from key science and technology writers at The Economist, The Economist Technology Quarterly readership and a judging panel of industry, academic, and investment luminaries.

The Economist Innovation Awards Committee judging panel ranked their first, second, and third choices in all categories. The committee includes Ron Cape, Founder, Cetus; Dave Farber, Professor, Business and Public Policy, The Wharton School; Francois Grey, Professor, Nanotechnology, Technical University of Denmark; Vinod Khosla, General Partner, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers; Mark Levin, Chairman and CEO, Millennium Pharmaceuticals; Amory Lovins, CEO, Rocky Mountain Institute, Andrew Odlyzko, Director, Digital Technology Centre, and Professor, Mathematics, University of Minnesota; Larry Page, Co-founder and President of Products, Google; Paul Romer, Professor of Economics, Stanford Graduate School of Business and Paul Saffo, Director, Institute for the Future (Awards Committee Co-Chair).

The Awards and Summit, developed in cooperation with Phocas Partners and sponsored by Scottish Development International and Burson-Marsteller, bring together a prestigious speaker faculty with diverse backgrounds offering new ways to look at innovation. While many of the world's most successful businesses look to innovation as a driving force, helping them to reduce costs, increase ROI and, ultimately, maximize shareholder value, a sustainable innovation-centric culture is not created overnight. The Summit explores the issues involved, drawing on the full weight of The Economist's intellectual capital--in particular its Technology Quarterly.

About Economist Conferences

Economist Conferences is a leading provider of highly interactive meetings--including industry conferences, management events and government roundtables--for senior executives seeking new insights into important strategic issues. Participants exchange views and compare experiences with other decision-makers and with specialist speakers from relevant fields. www.economistconferences.com

About Phocas Partners

Phocas Partners (www.phocaspartners.com) creates content-rich event programming for organizations that engage and educate readers, customers, prospects, employees and business partners. Relying on journalistic principles and a customer-centric approach, Phocas Partners serves media outlets, conference companies, corporations and trade associations - delivering event experiences that consistently exceed expectations. While its core mission is the production of content, Phocas Partners also provides audience acquisition, marketing, sales and logistics services.

About Scottish Development International

Scottish Development International is a joint venture between the Scottish Executive and Scottish Enterprise. Its vision is to fully integrate Scotland's international economic development activities. Under the umbrella of "Smart Successful Scotland,' the new strategy to make Scotland a key economic player in the 21st century, comes "The Global Connections' strategy, reflecting the radical changes needed for Scotland to prosper in the new age of the knowledge economy. For more information on Scottish Development International, please visit the web site at www.scottishdevelopmentinternational.com.

About Burson-Marsteller

Burson-Marsteller (www.bm.com), established in 1953, is a leading global public relations and communications counseling firm. It provides its clients with strategic thinking and program execution across a full range of public relations, public affairs, advertising and other communications services.

Burson-Marsteller, through its proprietary research, today leads the industry in its knowledge of and insights into the relationship between communications and the reputations of companies and their CEOs. These learnings are applied to the firm's many and varied corporate clients.

The firm has 72 offices in 32 countries, linking more than 1,600 professionals in a seamless global network and unified culture. In 1979, the firm joined the Young & Rubicam family of companies, which in October 2000 was acquired by WPP Group plc, one of the world's leading communications services groups.

Economist Conferences

Burson-Marsteller for Economist Conferences, Laura Evenson, 415/591-4037 direct, 415/601-7267, [REDACTED-EMAIL]

http://www.economistconferences.com

http://http://www.phocaspartners.com

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