Cooperative Innovation Award
Celebrating bold thinking and collaboration, the Cooperative Innovation Award recognises members who are redefining how cooperatives create value through fresh ideas, creative partnerships, or inventive ways of engaging and supporting their members and communities.
Award Criteria
This award is presented to one or more Cooperative Business NZ members who have championed innovative ways of working that strengthen the cooperative model.
It recognise initiatives that deliver measurable benefits for members or communities through creativity, collaboration, or fresh approaches to products, services, or operations.
This award is open to Full Members of Cooperative Business NZ, and joint entries are encouraged where the innovation is a shared initiative.
Cooperative Innovation winner 2025
ProCare
This new award in honour of International Year of Cooperatives 2025 celebrates those cooperatives and mutuals who have championed innovative ways of working that strengthen the model itself. It recognises initiatives that deliver measurable benefits through creativity, collaboration, and a willingness to challenge the status quo.
In a time when New Zealand’s primary healthcare sector is under immense strain, ProCare has led a bold, cooperative response, transforming how care is delivered, supported, and sustained.
ProCare’s innovation journey tackled some of the biggest challenges facing general practice: clinician burnout, administrative overload, and health inequity.
Through a suite of smart, people-centred technologies – including digital assistants to automate clinical and administrative tasks, AI scribes that save doctors hours each day, and the Health Accelerator joint venture that scales innovation across the country – ProCare has redefined what cooperative innovation looks like in healthcare.
The results are extraordinary: clinicians have gained up to three extra hours a day for patient care, operational costs have fallen, and screening rates, especially for Māori and Pacific patients, have improved significantly.
Most importantly, these innovations were designed with members, for members.