Bests WWW inventor Berners-Lee, JK Rowling, more

After being mentioned as on the shortlist last week, Sir Jonathan Ive has now been awarded the British Visionary Innovator award, a competition run by the Intellectual Property office in the UK to promote IP awareness. Ive was up against some very notable competition, including Sir Tim Berners-Lee who invented the World Wide Web; fellow industrial designer and engineer Sir James Dyson, and even Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling.

Despite an impressive list of nominees that also included James Goodfellow (creator of the automatic teller machine), computer innovator Alan Turing, Sir Richard Branson, Sir Clive Sinclair (inventor of the early ZX80 personal computer), the cast of Monty Python and scientist Sir Ian Wilmut (famous for cloning Dolly the sheep), Ive ran away with the vote. He won with almost half of the votes cast (46.6 percent), with Berners-Lee far behind in second at 18.8 percent.

Ive has collected a number of awards over the past year, from Designer of the Year awards from various UK societies to being knighted by Queen Elizabeth. Ive is credited with a number of forward-looking designs with Apple over the years, beginning with the ill-fated but still well-regarded 20th Anniversary Mac, to the more familiar designs of the iPod, iPhone, iMac (various incarnations), MacBook Air and iPad, among others.

by MacNN Staff