Corporate Special Achievement
Award Recipients

2008: The LEGO Group
The purpose and vision of The LEGO Group is to inspire children to explore and challenge their own creative potential. It strives to accomplish this by offering a range of high quality and fun products centered around its building systems. In the hands of children, the products inspire the unique form of LEGO play that is fun, creative, engaging, challenging -- all at the same time. In the process it "automatically" or playfully develops a set of future, highly-relevant capabilities: creative and structured problem-solving, curiosity and imagination, interpersonal skills and physical motor skills -- building with LEGO bricks is thus about "learning through play". The company’s vision builds on a continuation of the very essence of play with LEGO bricks -- the enjoyment of building –- enabling children to release their creativity and develop new things, and in the process expanding their imagination. LEGO play is learning how to think in both structured and creative modes – simultaneously.

2004: Pixar Animation Studios
Pixar Animation Studios combines creative and technical artistry to create original stories in the medium of computer animation. Pixar has created a number of the most successful and beloved animated films of all time: the Academy Award winning Toy Story, A Bug's Life, Toy Story 2, Monsters, Inc., and Finding Nemo. This year, Finding Nemo earned an Academy Award as the year's best animated film. Nemo also ranks as the highest grossing animated film in history. Since its incorporation, Pixar has been responsible for many important breakthroughs in the application of computer graphics to filmmaking. Pixar's talented creative teams have collaborated to develop three core proprietary software systems: Marionette, an animation software system for modeling, animating, and lighting; Ringmaster, a production management system; and Render Man II, a software system for high quality, photorealistic image synthesis.