Akimoto Award

The Akimoto Award for Excellence in Fostering Innovation was initiated in 2017 in memory of Mr Shin Akimoto, whose passion and commitment to Free Electrons and its members was unsurpassed.

Free Electrons wishes to recognise the value of the individuals who strive to foster and cultivate new ideas through encouraging and inspiring those around them.

The recipient of the Akimoto Award has embodied these ideals throughout their time in the program and will go on to act as a mentor to startups participating in the Free Electrons program in the coming years.

Scroll

About Shin Akimoto

Shin Akimoto was born in Japan, but lived in Iran from age 3-5 and Sweden from age 7-11. He returned to Japan and years later attended the prestigious University of Tokyo. Following graduation in 1993 he joined TEPCO and was assigned to international affairs. He was later seconded to Japan External Trade Organization (JETRO) and spent 3 years in Vienna. Upon returning to TEPCO he was involved in creating TEPCO’s data center business and later led the smart meter program.

In 2011 Shin was the manager in charge of TEPCO’s efforts to compensate victims of the nuclear accident and was transferred to Fukushima immediately following the accident. A cause he was extremely passionate about.

In 2015 Shin became Director of Innovation and led TEPCO’s efforts to collaborate with innovative global startups. Even after leaving Fukushima he often said that TEPCO has a responsibility to innovate and grow profits in order to repay the victims. He repeatedly reminded his team of this responsibility and encouraged them to be more innovative and customer centric. As a result, he was able to build strong relationships with numerous startups to bring innovation to TEPCO. His efforts culminated in TEPCO joining the Free Electrons program as a founding member.

Shin passed away on March 10, 2017 at the age of 48. He is survived by his wife and their 3 children.

2024

Jonathan Carrier - Co-founder and CEO at Allye Energy

LinkedIn

2023

Dr. Tom Algie - Co-founder and CEO of Grid Share

LinkedIn

2022

Lauren Kuntz - CEO and Co-Founder at Gaiascope

LinkedIn

2021

Puneet Jaggi - Founder of Prescinto Technologies

LinkedIn

2020

Chris Law - Co-founder and CEO of Future Grid

LinkedIn

2019

Julian Lee - Founder & CEO of Ambi Labs

LinkedIn

2018

Louise Rogerson - Chief Operating Officer of Howz

LinkedIn

2017

Derek Roddy - Founder of Climote

LinkedIn
We use cookies to personalise content and ads, to provide social media features and to analyse our traffic. We use your information internally to serve the content of this website in the best format and personalise things based on analytics results logs. View more
Cookies settings
Accept
Privacy & Cookie policy
Privacy & Cookies policy
Cookie name Active

Who we are

Our website address is: https://freeelectrons.org.

What personal data we collect and why we collect it

Comments

When visitors leave comments on the site we collect the data shown in the comments form, and also the visitor’s IP address and browser user agent string to help spam detection.

An anonymised string created from your email address (also called a hash) may be provided to the Gravatar service to see if you are using it. The Gravatar service privacy policy is available here: https://automattic.com/privacy/. After approval of your comment, your profile picture is visible to the public in the context of your comment.

Media

If you upload images to the website, you should avoid uploading images with embedded location data (EXIF GPS) included. Visitors to the website can download and extract any location data from images on the website.

Contact forms

Cookies

If you leave a comment on our site you may opt-in to saving your name, email address and website in cookies. These are for your convenience so that you do not have to fill in your details again when you leave another comment. These cookies will last for one year.

If you visit our login page, we will set a temporary cookie to determine if your browser accepts cookies. This cookie contains no personal data and is discarded when you close your browser.

When you log in, we will also set up several cookies to save your login information and your screen display choices. Login cookies last for two days, and screen options cookies last for a year. If you select "Remember Me", your login will persist for two weeks. If you log out of your account, the login cookies will be removed.

If you edit or publish an article, an additional cookie will be saved in your browser. This cookie includes no personal data and simply indicates the post ID of the article you just edited. It expires after 1 day.

Embedded content from other websites

Articles on this site may include embedded content (e.g. videos, images, articles, etc.). Embedded content from other websites behaves in the exact same way as if the visitor has visited the other website.

These websites may collect data about you, use cookies, embed additional third-party tracking, and monitor your interaction with that embedded content, including tracking your interaction with the embedded content if you have an account and are logged in to that website.

Analytics

Who we share your data with

How long we retain your data

If you leave a comment, the comment and its metadata are retained indefinitely. This is so we can recognise and approve any follow-up comments automatically instead of holding them in a moderation queue.

For users that register on our website (if any), we also store the personal information they provide in their user profile. All users can see, edit, or delete their personal information at any time (except they cannot change their username). Website administrators can also see and edit that information.

What rights you have over your data

If you have an account on this site, or have left comments, you can request to receive an exported file of the personal data we hold about you, including any data you have provided to us. You can also request that we erase any personal data we hold about you. This does not include any data we are obliged to keep for administrative, legal, or security purposes.

Where we send your data

Visitor comments may be checked through an automated spam detection service.

Your contact information

Additional information

How we protect your data

What data breach procedures we have in place

What third parties we receive data from

What automated decision making and/or profiling we do with user data

Industry regulatory disclosure requirements

Save settings
Cookies settings