Previous winners of the Visionary Award
2003: The Motorola team that invented the cell phone, including John Mitchell, former head of Motorola's communications division and the man who made the first cell call in 1973; Rudy Krolopp, 72, then Motorola's industrial design director, and Marty Cooper, 74, who ran Motorola's R&D effort in wireless communications, considered the "father of the cell phone."
2004: Mark Ratner, the Northwestern University chemistry professor who pioneered molecular electronics.
2005: Casey Cowell, co-founder and chairman of U.S. Robotics, which pioneered new methods of building better, faster and less-expensive modems for the Internet.
2006: Gerald Putnam, founder of the Archipelago electronic stock exchange, an alternative to the traditional stock exchange model of floor-based trading mediated by insiders called specialists.