Improving performance with smart thinking and technology
Our innovation and research team is dedicated to finding ways to bridge gaps and find gains for performance advantage. We work in collaboration with athletes, coaches and NSOs, implementing innovative solutions, products and technology to increase New Zealand athletes’ chances of success on the world stage.
Additional funding and resource are set to expand our work into research-focused innovation – a new area of work about finding answers that will have the greatest impact in helping multiple sports and their athletes perform better.
In deciding whether an innovative project will provide a competitive advantage, the team follows five guiding principles:
Guiding Principles
| Performance | Ensuring each idea has an explicit link to medals |
| Priority | Prioritising demand from the athlete, coach or high performance director |
| Champion | Ensuring projects have potential champions |
| Evidence | Promoting a model-driven paradigm (evidence based) |
| Impact | The ability to measure proposed and actual impact |
Articles
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$6.4+ million
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Innovation Delivery
Depending on the nature of the innovation delivery project and the expertise needed, projects are either completed in-house or in collaboration with our external innovation partners. Around 50% of projects are completed internally by Goldmine, HPSNZ’s in-house engineering team.
With 4 full-time staff and a roster of world-class contractors, Goldmine creates bespoke hardware and software solutions which have positively impacted on New Zealand athletes’ training and performance time and time again.
Over the last 7 years, its innovations have contributed towards over 100 World, Olympic and Paralympic medals.
Goldmine is currently working on a number of innovation delivery projects, with an emphasis on success at the Paris 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games and the Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Olympic and Paralympic Games.
Collaboration
We leverage the world-class NZ knowledge by working collaboratively with many nationwide innovation partners to provide novel interventions to solve performance problems.
Goldmine
From scratch, our in-house engineers build hardware and software solutions that are not available off the shelf, giving NZ athletes a tangible point of difference.
Research
A focus on research that seeks to answer the big performance-based research questions for greatest impact in helping sports and their athletes perform better.
2025 Innovation Application Rounds
| 2025 Innovation Round 1 |
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| 2025 Innovation Round 2 |
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