Millennium Technology Prize - The Prize

The Prize

The Prize celebrates innovations that have a favourable impact on quality of life and well-being or on sustainable development. It has been established to steer the course of technological development to a more humane direction. The objective of the Millennium Technology Prize is to highlight technical development that has a humanitarian focus, to make the work of researchers and application builders in different sectors better known, and to encourage discussion and debate between researchers, companies, and national and communal decision makers.

The Millennium Prize is awarded by Technology Academy Finland (formerly Millennium Prize Foundation and Finnish Technology Award Foundation), established in 2002 by eight Finnish organisations supporting technological development and innovation. The prize pool for the prize is about 1.1 million euros (~US$ 1.3 million) which is divided between the winner and other laureates. The main prize sum of 800,000 euros (~US$ 1 million). The Millennium Technology Prize is awarded every second year and is presented by the president of Finland. The Millennium Technology Prize is the world's largest technology award. The predecessor to the Millennium Prize was the Walter Ahlström prize.

Compared to the Nobel Prize the Millennium Prize is a technology award, whereas the Nobel Prize is a science award. Furthermore, the Nobel Prize is awarded for basic research, but the Millennium Prize may be given to a recently conceived innovation which is still being developed.

Universities, research institutes, national scientific and engineering academies and high-tech companies around the world are eligible to nominate individuals or groups for the award. In accordance with the rules of the Technology Academy Finland, a proposal concerning the winner of the Millennium Technology Prize is made to the board of the foundation by the eight-member international selection committee, and the final decision on the prize winner is made by the board.