Blues Awards are a university tradition that originated from England. The blue colours of Oxford and Cambridge Universities came to symbolise sporting excellence. At the University of Auckland, Blues Awards have evolved to recognise excellence in other fields such as Arts and Culture, Service and Leadership, and as of 2019 - Innovation. This year there were 9 Innovation Awards recipients, including overall Innovation category award winner, Taylor Grey - founder of Radic Performance.

GovHack is the largest open data hackathon in the southern hemisphere. It aims to bring together people of all abilities who seek to make life better through open data. Usually, in multiple cities across Australia and New Zealand, hackathons would run where participants would come together in venues to form teams, agree on projects, and participate in an open data competition. However, 2020 has been anything except usual.

How organisations acquire new talent is changing rapidly. At the forefront of this movement is Talegent, the New Zealand organisation pushing the boundaries of talent assessment and recruitment through their range of proprietary prediction analytics tools and gamified cognitive assessments.

Carline Bentley is passionate about many things - the environment, badminton (she played competitively) - but mostly, building prosperous communities. She is currently working as an Investment and Trade Advisor for Investment Fiji, the investment and trade promotion agency of the Fijian government.

Health and safety should be easy. This is the ethos of ecoPortal, New Zealand’s leading health and safety (H&S), risk, and sustainability management software. EcoPortal empowers H&S executives to keep their employees safe and reduce their environmental impact by shifting their company culture from one of compliance to genuine care.

Home building automation, placenta burial, educational toys, microplastics disposal, patient ventilation, hospital rostering, fish classification and urban farming are just some of the venture ideas that have made the finals of this year’s Velocity $100k Challenge.

Kiwis who have achieved incredible things on the world stage are being celebrated at Symbolically Kiwi, an interactive art exhibition by MrGeometric, otherwise known as Ang Nayyar, software engineer and previous CEO of the Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship’s Velocity programme (formerly Spark).

Dr Rahul Gandhi is a University of Auckland alumnus who is currently helping lead Wellington’s pandemic response. He has been entrusted with this responsibility after proven leadership in a range of life-saving endeavors around the world.

Last week the Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship at the University of Auckland held its VentureLab showcase. Four teams, each winners from last year's Velocity entrepreneurship programme, spent the last six months developing their ideas further in a virtual incubator.

An unconventional approach to supporting early-stage projects developed at the University of Auckland has expanded nationwide, and is turning heads internationally. Momentum is an investment committee programme which provides access to world-class advice, connections, and investment opportunities to students and their start-ups across New Zealand.