Alberta Energy Company chief executive David Mitchell decided in 1980 that Canada needed some home-grown heroes. Canadians who turned their creative genius into beneficial technology deserved recognition within their own country.

It was a bright idea and it needed a prominent Canadian who would champion the notion. He found the right person in former Alberta Premier Ernest Manning, who commanded national respect and agreed to attach his name to the concept.

From that seed, the Manning Innovation Awards grew into one of Canada's most prestigious annual awards programs for Canadian innovators.

"It really stemmed from a thought that Canadians seemed to have to go somewhere else before they were recognized," says Mitchell, president of the Manning Innovation Awards Foundation and former president, chief executive officer and chairman of Alberta Energy Company.

Together, Mitchell and Manning built a nucleus of highly respected Canadian scientists and business people who became the first trustees of the new foundation. Manning visited the Nobel Prize organization in Sweden and the Ford Foundation in the United States to seek advice in structuring the made-in-Canada program.

To ensure the program's credibility, Manning, Mitchell and the other trustees agreed that an independent committee of expert evaluators would choose the award winners - and their decision would be final. The Manning Foundation has been run that way since day one, Mitchell notes. "Ernest Manning himself crystallized those ideas."

The first year of the program consisted of one $75,000 award - a significant cash prize nearly three decades ago. Now each year the Manning Foundation distributes $165,000, among four leading Canadian innovators, including the $100,000 Principal Award, plus an additional $20,000 among eight young Canada-Wide Science Fair winners. In its first 30 years, the Foundation awarded more than $4.5 million to encourage and recognize Canadian innovators.

Canadian innovations recognized by the Manning Foundation have ranged from the artificial knee to a humane device that silences dog barking, from a rapid DNA sequencing machine to the V-chip which blocks unwanted television programming. Award winners "have come from all across Canada," Mitchell says.

Mitchell received the Outstanding Contribution to the Alberta Science and Technology Community Award from the Alberta Science and Technology Awards Foundation in 2000. With characteristic understatement, he says his greatest reward in creating the Manning Foundation has been "the pleasure of getting to know really bright, dedicated, wonderful Canadians . . . that's a real privilege."