Masahiro Hara

Masahiro Hara is a Japanese engineer, born in Tokyo in 1957, who is best known for inventing the QR code in 1994. He studied in the department of electric and electronic engineering at Hosei University and graduated in 1980, then joined Denso, a Toyota Group subsidiary, where he began developing a barcode system. In 1992, in Denso's development department, later Denso Wave, he was tasked with creating a new two dimensional code to track automotive components efficiently, and the code was introduced in 1994. In 2014 he and the QR code development team received the European Inventor Award, and he later served as chief engineer and adviser for a school program in Niger.