Sport & Recreation

The game comprises 56 hexagonal tiles which have on them different-coloured lines and curves that must be laid, according to the game's rules, against tiles that match up, making continuous lines and loops. The winner makes the longest single-coloured line or the biggest single-coloured loop (loops are worth more points).

Tantrix has an element of chance as well as the strategy, which means that even a beginner or a child will sometimes beat a champion.

The idea of jumping off things is not a new one, nor is the idea of stopping oneself before one gets hurt. Again, like many inventions, it's not necessarily about coming up with a brand new idea, it can be about taking an existing one and making it work. The natives of Vanuatu have for centuries been jumping off large towers with vines tied around their legs to break their fall. And their legs. This ritual has little meaning for foreigners, and is wholly unattractive, unless billed as some sort of cure for shortness. The English apparently had a try of it in the 1980s, but it didn't last. What this crazy idea needed was a plan to make it less, well, fatal seeming. Alan John (AJ) Hackett (b. 1958) had just such a plan.

Arthur Lydiard (b. 1917, d. 2004) was an Auckland shoemaker, and in 1945 he decided to design a personal programme to keep himself fit. Nine years later he was the New Zealand marathon champion and began to coach young runners using the methods he developed for himself. His basic credo was a combination of aerobic and anaerobic running, as often as two or three times a day for weeks on end, and his training regimes were well worked out over years of trial and error.

The results speak for themselves. In one hour at the 1960 Olympics, two of Arthur's local athletes, Peter Snell and Murray Halberg won gold medals, then another of his athletes, Barry Magee, got bronze in the marathon two days later. They were just the beginning. Lydiard's programme produced a string of Olympic medals and world records. More than that, Lydiard became a coach of coaches, the world's genuine guru of fitness.

It is safe to say that today, no corner of athletics (or fitness training for any sport) is untouched by his influence.

Peter Lynn (b. 1946) is a man somewhat obsessed with kites – a strange occupation but as a world renowned kite designer, Peter has managed to make a living dangling things from the end of a bit of string. It’s the new New Zealand success story – pick a niche, and then be the best in that niche. Before he started with his kite obsession, Lynn also created a ‘tipping blade’ sawmill system in the 1970s. He realised there was a better way for sawmills to work than having two blades, and making a sawmill that could do the same job for the same energy with just one blade might be a winner.

It was. He patented his idea, licensed it out and largely forgot about it, and the system is now adopted broadly in sawmill systems around the world. Moving on from sawmills, he became the holder of a number of patents around the world for innovations in kite design (‘A wing for a traction kite comprises a plurality of cells formed by chordwise- extending ribs . . . ’) and also the world record holder for the largest kite ever flown – with a total area of 1019m2, it’s over 40m wide, weighs over 200 kg and was in the shape of a giant Kuwaiti flag.

Lynn lives in Ashburton but spends much of the year travelling, and is a pioneer in the use of kites for sports – he developed the sport of kite buggying; and his kiteboards and kitesurfers can often be seen in the windy, low-tide areas around New Zealand and the world, terrorising the locals.

Geoff Barnett conceived of the system in the urban jungle that is Tokyo in 2008, and has installed a working 'concept system' into the Agroventures park in Rotorua.

Barnett, originally an Australian, relocated to the Rotorua lakeside to work with his kiwi business partner Peter Cossey to turn Shweeb into a reality. As part of the Rotorua 'Agroventures' Adventure park, their fully working 'concept model' Shweeb has had over 75,000 riders from the ages of 4 to 89, and shows the viability of the concept in a fun way. Working with Google, and engineers around the world, Cossey and Barnett have continued to refine both the Shweeb, but also the overall business model.

Cossey describes the process of creating a new urban transport system as very time consuming and expensive, with lots of learning along the way and some negativity to overcome. He prefers to take the approach of assuming the idea WILL succeed, and then working around the reasons why it wouldn't.

The Google money helped, but he says it's just 10% of the money they need to realise the vision.

Alexander started designing the Springfree Trampoline way back in 1987 when his wife didn't want to get a trampoline due to the danger of snapping her kids' limbs.

Being a good father, and a curious engineer, he saw this as an engineering issue rather than a safety issue, and he set about improving the tramp. It turned out to be a harder challenge than expected, and he enlisted the help of his graduate students to solve some of the tricky engineering issues. In all, it took around 15 years for the idea to become a reality. The final design uses fibre-glass reinforced plastic rods to help bouncing instead of using those nasty old springs that pinch and injure people so often.

The rods are placed diagonally from the metal frame and support the mat from beneath so that anyone bouncing on it can't land between the springs and hit the frame - no more chipped teeth. It's unclear whether this also solves the old 'static shock when dismounting on a hot day' problem but it's certainly made the backyard nutcracker substantially safer. Very safe and still just as bouncy - test trampolines are subjected to three million bounces as part of the rigorous testing, simulating 10 years of usage.

Ryan set about inventing the Yike Bike very purposefully. He had already been part of four 'startups' and by this fifth one he knew what he was doing. The vision was clear and ambitious - to invent the most common transport device in the world. The Segway was the inspiration and Ryan even called the Yike Bike development project Project Garlic, after Segway's codename 'Project Ginger'.

They started with one certainty - the front wheel needed to be about 20 inches (like an old Raleigh 20) to allow a smooth ride. Ryan and his small team went immediately into rapid prototyping - an iterative process where you begin by making something, then you change what's wrong with it, and make it again until you reach a solution to the problem. 'We failed rapidly' says Ryan, and twenty prototypes later the process worked. The first prototypes were pedal-powered and then they introduced electric motors. By the time they cried 'We've found it' they had a very new solution to human transport - the mini-farthing.

A solution, Ryan is adamant, they never would have come up with on paper or in a single 'eureka' moment.

Henry Rodolph Wigley (b. 1913, d. 1980) continued the kiwi tradition of being first with an aviation exploit and then having the world largely ignore it.

In Wigley's case, he was the first to land on snow in a plane with skis as well as wheels. He also survived, which makes the story even more interesting. Wigley was born in Christchurch. His father was the managing director of Mt Cook airlines and his mother designed their distinctive logo, based on the butterup that grows in the region and is often wrongly called the Mt Cook lily. Wigley learned to fly at an early age, but in 1936 was lucky to survive an incident when the aeronautic plane he was passenger in had a near miss.

The Air Force plane was attempting inverted flying, looping and rolling at low altitude and managed to clip a parked bus, losing part of the undercarriage as a result. They landed safely with no injuries to Wigley or the pilot, although two newspaper reporters in the bus did get a nasty fright.

True to the name, at first they were bought mainly by people in rural areas and other runners, but they soon caught on with the urbanites who began to see the Mountain Buggy - much like their 4 wheel drive car - as a statement of what they aspired to be, rather than who they currently were. The product took off, the brand gained awareness quickly, and the Mountain Buggy company was on a serious growth curve.

The buggies were marketed and sold internationally and at first things went well. Some tricky growth issues meant the company was stretched for growth capital, and Croad sold the business in 2004 to a larger company (Tritec). Tritec proceeded to go into liquidation but was bought by their big NZ competitor, Phil & Teds Most Excellent Buggy Company Ltd. Phil & Ted's, to their credit, recognised the value of the brand and have retained the Mountain Buggy name, a name still recognised and respected world-wide.

Emerson said that if you build a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to your door. If you therefore build a better umbrella, can you expect riches to rain down on you?

That’s what Greig Brebner and the team at Blunt Umbrellas hopes. They’ve invented a better umbrella – sorry, they’ve ‘redesigned the entire idea of a personal weather protection canopy’ – to make one that won’t turn inside out in a strong breeze. Indeed, the Blunt Umbrella can withstand a force 12 gale, thanks to its unique Radial Tensioning System (ie, it has flash spokes).

It also looks good, with patented blunt tips giving it a distinctive style, and Wired Magazine described it as a “solid, reliable wet-weather sanctuary, its architectural integrity as unbroken as the dome of St. Peter’s”. The Blunt is selling around the world, stocked in some of the most stylish retail locations in some of the most stylish cities.

Not bad for something as ordinary as an umbrella. Sorry – “personal weather protection canopy”.

It’s a quad bike that goes on the water, and it’s a jetski that goes on land. Finally – a solution to the age-old problem of how to annoy people on sea and on shore! It’s the first commercially available amphibian to do more than 10 knots on the water and more than 10km/h on land. In fact, with its 1300cc BMW engine it can do 72km/h on land and the same on the water, taking only five or so seconds to transition between the two.

The Quadski hit the market in April 2013 and since then the 175 staff at Gibbs’ Detroit plant have turned out 100 a month. For just $42,000 you can buy a piece of New Zealand invention history. In February 2014 the Quadski was featured on Top Gear (the most watched factual programme in the world). In a race from one side of Italy’s Lake Como to the other (‘the usual bullshit’, as Gibbs calls it), Richard Hammond drove Alpha Romeo’s brand new 4C and Jeremy Clarkson drove Alan Gibbs’ Quadski.

Of course, the Quadski won.

The Zorb – a device designed to induce vomiting in adults with too much money. Brothers David and Andrew Akers didn’t invent the idea of putting people into a giant ball and rolling it down a hill, but they found a way to make people pay for it.

Their venture began in 1994 in Rotorua and people now Zorb all over the globe.