UK Sport is delighted to announce the three winners of this year’s Ideas4Innovation competition. For the first time since the competition began in 2008, the three winners were all entrants in the ‘Garage Innovators’ category and the £25,000 in research funding has been split between them.
The aim of UK Sport's Ideas4Innovation programme is to develop an award scheme to acknowledge and harness outstanding research and innovation concepts for elite sport, generated by the UK's research community, to support the mission to London 2012 and beyond. The Garage Innovators Award is open to any sports enthusiast with creative ideas and expertise that may have the potential to enhance the performance of British Olympic or Paralympic athletes.
Also for the first time in the three year history of Ideas4Innovation, a group of inventors has been awarded a prize in the Garage Innovators category. Four engineering and design specialists from London, who meet as a group regularly in their spare time to come up with new inventions, were inspired to apply their knowledge to sport when they heard about the Ideas4Innovation Awards.
The group – self named ‘The Imagination Factory’ - came up with over 40 ideas that were narrowed down to their top four which they submitted to UK Sport for consideration. Two of these made the final stages and were presented to an expert panel at UK Sport HQ, before one, an idea that could benefit several sports (including triathlon, modern pentathlon and swimming) was given a Garage Innovators Award, to allow further investigation towards 2012. The four inventors are Charlie Ashworth, Mark Hester, Julian Swan and Stuart Pallant. Charlie said: “The Imagination Factory is overjoyed to be selected as a winner of this year's competition and cannot wait to get started on developing our idea for the British team ahead of 2012."
Also awarded research funding is Dr Dick Thijssen, a Research Fellow at Liverpool John Moores University, for his idea for a novel warm up method. His Garage Innovators Award will be used to further his research immediately in the field, with access to Britain’s elite athletes as a testing pool. He said: “I'm really happy that UK Sport is providing me with the opportunity to be part of their highly committed team that strives to get the best out of British athletes.
“With this novel method that can be applied during the warm-up phase, I expect athletes to make an additional step forward and optimise their performance level.”
The third 2010 winner is Dave Richards, Group Leader for the Mechanical Design Group at Frazer-Nash Consultancy. He said: “I'm really happy to have won the Garage Innovators Award this year. I feel that my idea, which is a mix of cutting edge engineering technology and good practical engineering can have a positive impact on British athletes in time for London.
“The idea draws from Frazer-Nash's experience of working in the field of high quality Aerospace Engineering and hopefully will be one of the elements that turns some of our world class athletes into gold medal winners."
Head of Research and Innovation at UK Sport, Dr Scott Drawer, said: “We have been really impressed by the quality of applications for Ideas4Innovation this year, as the concepts presented to us have shown a real grasp of the need for rapid and direct performance impact. The need for this was particularly pertinent this year, as 2010 is likely to be the last Ideas4Innnovation Award that can have an impact on performances in 2012.
“We are very excited to be working with these winners in the build up to the London Games, particularly in the case of The Imagination Factory where we feel we have uncovered some talented individuals who were previously untapped in terms of elite sport, and that is what Ideas4Innovation is all about.”
Those interested in applying in 2011, where the focus will shift to finding performance gains for Sochi 2014 and Rio 2016, can get more information and register their interest in the Ideas4Innovation Award.
Please note: despite a high standard of applications and finalists for this year’s New Researchers Award, none of the projects selected to present to the judges were deemed able to make a significant impact on the performances of British athletes in 2012 and therefore the £25,000 research grant has not been awarded.