Many times competitions are not exciting. Many times students don't bring innovative ideas. Many times the winner is clear from the start. Today we tell you a different story. Let’s start from the beginning.
What was the Innovation Challenge?
An innovative competition, where the Municipality of Trento wanted to involve students from the University of Trento to work together on one of the main objectives of the European project Stardust: the creation of a hub to sorting things within the city's last urban mile, through electric transport.
During the competition, the challenges posed to the participants were twofold but well defined: how to better communicate the creation of this hub and, at the same time, how to create new eco-sustainable business models for the city: 5 teams, 33 students with a heterogeneous academic path.
Here we are reaching the final! All the teams presented their projects to the jury of the Innovation Challenge: Alberto Salizzoni councillor of the Municipality of Trento, Marco Cattani for Trentino Mobilità, Roberto Napoli, Carlo Pasquini and Alessandro Rossi for CLab Trento.
Some of the teams wanted to face this challenge with a completely digital approach, through the creation and management of a new online website where merchants could enhance their commercial network, relying on the new sorting centre for last urban mile delivery.
Others wanted to catch one of the main meanings of Stardust: environmental sustainability, focusing on enhancing a delivery service that could be entirely electric within the historic centre. The use of electric bicycles would drastically reduce pollution while speeding up delivery times.
There are those who wanted to underline the economic potential of the initiative, making the jury thinks about how the shops of the fresh food could increase and exploit the new sorting centre. Small local merchants could receive, manage and then deliver orders through a new online portal that would increase customers by continuing to decrease the environmental impact.
There were many ways to face the Innovation Challenge and the participants went beyond the brightest of expectations. They were able to adopt a macro vision, starting from the search for the best European practices, from which they created a micro solution tailored to the municipality of Trento, taking into account the reference population, their daily habits and their desires.
As we have always said: there is no single solution to a problem.
At the end of the presentations, all the projects had hit the mark.
Starting from the same challenge, they all came to completely different but, at the same time, correct conclusions. The jury did not have an easy life but in the end, they managed to decree the winner.
Indeed, two winners: congrats to team 2 and 3!
The Innovation Challenge has ended, but the engine that brought the results is always present, ready for the next challenge and we, as CLab Trento, can't wait to turn it on again.