R&D 100 Award

The prestigious R&D 100 Awards program, now in its 44th year, honors the 100 most technologically significant new products of the past year. The awards program is international in its scope and technologies are nominated in open competition. The Illinois-based R&D Magazine uses technical criteria to pick the most important, unique and useful entries to be included in the top 100. Corporations, government labs, private research institutes, and universities throughout the world vie for the awards. Winners are chosen by the editors of the magazine and a large panel of experts in a variety of disciplines. The judges look for breakthrough products or processes that promise to improve people's lives through technological advances. The awards are often called the "Oscars" of applied research.

Over the years, the R&D 100 Awards have recognized winning products with such household names as Polacolor film (1963), the flashcube (1965), the automated teller machine (1973), the halogen lamp (1974), the fax machine 1975), the liquid crystal display (1980), the printer (1986), the Kodak Photo CD (1991), the Nicoderm antismoking patch (1992), Taxol anticancer drug (1993), lab on a chip (1996), HDTV (1998) and Glucometer DEX diabetes care system (2000). The OnGuard Atmospheric Corrosion Monitor joined this group of elite products in 1992 when it was honored with the R&D 100 Award.