Volvo Group logo

Story

Volvo and Hyper Island continue to drive change

2021-12-02
How can Hyper Island help organizations to monitor, prevent, reduce, or offset greenhouse gas emissions for goods transport with true transparency? This fully-loaded question is the latest challenge for Hyper Island students to tackle, with the opportunity provided by the unique partnership between Hyper Island and Volvo Group. Read on to find out more about how the partnership is working towards leading the change of tomorrow, today.
Volvo and Hyper Island continue to drive change

Partnering with future talent to lead change

Since 2018, Volvo has enabled Hyper Island to pursue projects with ambitious challenges that have encouraged students to ideate and develop concepts around complex topics, such as logistics planning, time and cost efficiency in construction transportation, sustainability for the transport ecosystem partners and more. This is a unique opportunity for Volvo to partner with future talent and drive change and not only stay relevant, but together be in the forefront of innovation and sustainable development.

“At Hyper Island, we have a clear purpose: to challenge others to “Rise to the Challenge”. It means daring to explore new things and overcome obstacles — something that also correlates a lot with what Volvo is focusing on. This partnership represents a significant part in accomplishing that purpose,” says Pernilla Hallberg, Head of Learning Partnerships at Hyper Island.

“Connectivity is accelerating the pace of change. To develop and scale new connected service offerings, we have to collaborate with learning partners such as Hyper Island,” says Tommy Hansson Strand, Vice President, Innovation at Volvo Group Connected Solutions.

Hack Sprint – creating real-world solutions

Hack Sprint is a hackathon series initiated by Volvo Group Connected Solutions. It’s a way of working that brings together carefully selected teams to hack real-world solutions for real-world challenges with real-world impact.

At the latest HackSprint with Volvo and Hyper Island students the challenge was: how can we support firms to monitor, prevent, reduce, or offset greenhouse gas emissions for goods transport with true transparency? In the ideation process, the students are not alone. Volvo is there throughout the process to lend their advice in response to the students’ perspectives.

Director Business Innovation & Foresight at Volvo Group Connected Solutions, Hans Lind, finds the collaboration with Hyper Island students to be very valuable. “We’ve had a broad Volvo Group participation in both preparation and execution of the Hacksprints. Several of our business areas have discovered the usefulness of working together with our partner, Hyper Island in this format,” he said. “The students bring new perspectives and are very quick to connect the dots between the latest in digital and transportation. Being able to generate ideas and solutions and present them in a pitch format to Volvo Group experts in just 48 hours is nothing short of amazing.”   

A new energy brought by Hyper Island students

“The Volvo team gets infused by the energy shown by the students from Hyper Island,” continues Hans Lind. “Nowadays, we try to connect the partnership even more over the year to the Hack Sprint that becomes the starting point for collaboration. Later, we can have smaller projects with a longer duration to deep dive into business models or UX designs. This creates a flow between Volvo and Hyper Island, almost like breathing. And it renders great output too!”

This is what the winning team, Team 21, had to say: “It was fantastic to be able to explore together with Volvo Group how to tackle sustainable innovation in goods transportation. Learning that becoming carbon neutral is a top priority for Volvo was very inspiring for us. This made us even more committed to deep dive into research and learn everything we could about the transport and logistics sector. As a team, we experienced three very intense, but equally fun days, working on the brief and exploring all our different thoughts around it. We’re all very excited that we now have the opportunity to present our ideas further at Volvo Group’s global innovation stage, the Edge Talk!”

Related stories