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• The significance of the award is as follows:
• IR stands for Industrial Research. (This award does not deal with basic research.)
• 52 means 52 weeks per year, namely one item every week.
• Jang Young-Shil was one of the greatest inventors in the Korean history.
• The award was established in 1991 to honor and encourage engineers who accomplished a prominent job in technologically innovative activities of private companies, result of which was successfully commercialized into a new product or process during the last two years.

• The award given weekly in the name of the Ministy of Science and ICT is so widely recognized to be one of the highest for innovation in Korea that even the general public can approve the value of the award.

• It stimulates research and development activities of private firms in Korea and encourages R&D professionals to conduct research more enthusiastically. When an engineer wins the award, he or she feels very honored.

• An applied product or process has to pass two stages of assessment to be an awardee. The criteria of the selection are technological importance, orig-inality, economic value and technical spill-over effect. All of the evaluators are experts invited from academia and research organizations.

• Awarding ceremony is held three times a year, covering 4 or 5 awarded products or processes. Taking part in the ceremony, Ministry of Science and ICT gives both a trophy to the recipient company and a medal to each engineer who developed the recipient product or the process, together with a certificate.

• The general public can read about the recipient good and its developers every week in the co-sponsoring daily called the Maeil Business Newspaper, the most influential economic daily in Korea. the recipient company advertises the fact that they won the award, through mass media such as TV commer-cials, newspapers and so on.

• KOITA selects the best among 52 awarded goods of the previous year for the President's Award and the second best for the Prime Minister's Award.

• KOITA is in charge of all of the administrative activities form application through selection to awarding.