Ideas 4 Innovation

UK Sport - Research and Innovation

Image/James Roche/UK Sport

UK Sport is charged with leading sport in the UK to World Class Success. To achieve this, UK Sport works in partnership to deliver medals at the Olympic and Paralympic Games.

Innovation is a key part of UK Sport’s work. The innovation team, led by Dr Scott Drawer, lead research into novel ways in which to squeeze out that extra drop of performance that can make a difference between a place on the podium and coming home empty handed.

At the Athens Olympic Games in 2004, there was less than half a second in time difference between winning and losing the gold medal in Kelly Homes’ 800m race, the men’s coxless fours win, Chris Hoy’s victory in the 1km time trial and the men’s 4x100m final put together. With gold medals won and lost within such tiny margins, innovation really can make a difference to the success of British athletes.

The Innovation team at UK Sport want to harness ideas that could benefit British athletes in competition and training and to reward you for your creativity.

The aim of the UK Sport's Ideas 4 Innovation programme is to develop an award scheme to acknowledge outstanding concepts generated by the UK's research community, which will support the mission to London 2012 and beyond. There are two competitions: the New Researchers Award - aimed at final year students - and the Garage Innovators Award - open to any sports enthusiast with creative ideas that may have the potential to enhance the performance of British athletes. See links below for more details on both Awards.

By developing and encouraging an active and applied UK research community in sports science, medicine, technology and engineering we hope to impact on knowledge and ideas for elite Olympic and Paralympic sport.

in PARTNERSHIP WITH THE GATSBY INNOVATION AWARDS

UK Sport is working with Loughborough University's Gatsby Innovation Awards to encourage creative thinking amongst talented researchers, from first class students to individuals and groups with revolutionary concepts – the unrecognised heroes of British Innovation.

UK Sport is hoping to generate thinking that will provide a performance advantage to Olympic and Paralympic sports whilst the Gatsby Innovation Awards primarily focus on ideas with commercial potential.

When applying for either award you will need to decide whether your idea primarily has performance or commercial potential. See below for more details.