From 2000 to 2020, the World Technology Network (WTN) via the annual World Technology Awards identified and honored the world's most innovative individuals and organizations in science, technology, and related fields. The WTN and its honorees – those creating the 21st century – are exploring what is imminent, possible, and important in and around emerging technologies. The World Technology Awards have been presented each year for two decades to the most outstanding innovators from 20 different categories of science and technology as a way to bring attention and recognition to their catalytic achievements and ideas.

Each year, we asked the WTN Fellows — the Winners and Finalists (in the individual, non-organizational award categories) from previous annual Awards cycles to nominate those in their opinion doing the work of the greatest likely long-term significance, in addition to those found through our own research. The WTN also accepted appropriate outside nominations for the Awards. We then got back to the Fellows and asked them to judge from among the new, combined pool of extraordinary nominees to determine the Finalists. We selected the Winners from the Finalists. All Winners and Finalists then joined, as in each previous year, the elected membership.

The WTN recognized key players – from cutting-edge technologists to forward-thinking financiers, from conceptual futurists to grounded entrepreneurs, from insightful science writers to savvy marketers, from big-picture government officials to focused policy analysts, and from the world's leading corporations to the world's newest start-ups. We sought to encourage serendipity – the happy accidents of colliding ideas and new relationships that cause the biggest breakthroughs for individuals and institutions.

From 1999/2000 to 2015/16, the WTN (in association with TIME, Fortune, and other global media partners) convened an annual World Technology Summit, capped on on the final night with a black-tie gala to present the World Technology Awards. The WTN also convened more focused events — such as the World Energy Technologies Summit (held in 2004 and 2010) and the World Summit on Technological Unemployment (2015). Video is available from the more recent events (See videos here). For the past few years, the WTN has no longer held the very broadly focused World Technology Summits and has instead focused only a more targeted activities. The prime example of that new approach was the International Congress for the Governance of Artificial Intelligence (ICGAI), held virtually in 2021, in partnership with the Carnegie Council on Ethics in International Affairs, among many prominent others. (For more information, please visit www.icgai.org)