The Pattern That Changed the World
Masahiro Hara, the inventor of the QR Code
In 1993, Masahiro Hara didn’t set out to change the world, he just wanted to solve a problem at work.
At that time he was working at Denso Wave, an automotive components manufacturer. And barcodes were an issue. Barcodes could only be read from one angle, store very little information, and slowed down manufacturing lines. Any smudge from the car grease and it held up operations. Even a light smear could stop the whole line. Sometimes there were up to 10 different barcodes on a single automotive part to track everything it needed.
No one asked Masahiro Hara to create a new barcode. It wasn’t part of his job. It wasn’t an idea from his boss. He saw a need and followed it, an act of quiet initiative that would ripple across decades.
He told his bosses that he wanted to develop a new, improved scannable code for Denso’s car parts.
He combed through thousands of printed materials: magazines, cardboard boxes, flyers, studying black and white patterns to find something scanners could instantly recognize. The answer came from Go, the board game that first inspired the idea. A black square inside a square. A pattern that almost never appeared anywhere else.
“It was early 1993, when I was 34 and when I was playing Go, which is a board game, during a lunch break. The concept of putting black and white dots on a grid occurred to me.”
What emerged was the QR code, a two-dimensional code with three position markers in its corners, allowing scanners to instantly locate and read it from any direction. The code could store up to 200 times more information than a traditional barcode and could still be read even if 30% of it was damaged.
But, Hara’s bosses weren’t impressed. It wasn’t immediately obvious how the code would be used or if it would generate any business at all. But Hara believed in the potential. In a bold move, Denso Wave made the QR code free to use, an open-source gift to the world. They sold only the scanners required to read the QR codes. This act of generosity was strategic, but also deeply human. Hara didn’t hoard the solution. He gave it away because he knew it could help more than just Denso Wave.
For a while, the world barely noticed.
Then, slowly, the seeds began to sprout:
Manufacturing adopted it.
Retail followed.
Marketing caught on.
But it took crisis to make the code go global. First came mad cow disease in Japan, where QR codes were used to trace infected meat back to its source. Then came mobile payments in China. Then came smartphones with cameras. And finally, COVID. The entire world needed contactless everything: menus, tickets, test results, and payments. And the humble QR code became essential.
What started as a tool to speed up factory lines became a universal language of access, used across billions of devices and in every corner of the world.
At Think Variant, we believe innovation doesn’t always explode. Sometimes, it starts with a single person solving a problem and it grows into something for everyone. Sometimes, the real breakthrough isn’t just the invention itself… it’s the choice to share it.
