Make-It! The development of hackathons to face grand challenges in collaboration with EIT Food

Letizia Mortara and Serena Flammini are collaborating with Dr Shima Barakat from OPdA at a three-year project, co-funded by the EIT (EU Institute of Innovation and Technology), the IfM Open Innovation Forum and STIM. The project aims to develop a process for hackathons to address ‘Grand Challenges’ in the food and beverage industry.

The work will progress in collaboration with partners in 6 EU countries and fabrication spaces across Europe. Creating a smarter and simpler food value chain across Europe requires an infrastructure and capacity to stimulate and support innovation and entrepreneurship that needs to be developed. This project aims to achieve this through designing and delivering a series of hackathons across Europe where different stakeholders come together to find solutions to identified industry challenges and forming an association of maker spaces that offer sustained space for hacks and further prototyping resources. The project aims further to train professionals to be able to develop entrepreneurial capabilities across the food value chain in Europe.

This research might be an opportunity for managers in large organisations to explore hackathons as a way to address systemic problems and access other best practice across Europe. The Grand Challenges will focus mostly on problems related to food and its supply chains. However, these could be relevant also to other industries facing similar challenges. More information on our website soon!

Pitch-In: Mass customisation via the IoT

A new project will start in February, led by Letizia Mortara, in collaboration with Arçelik and supported by the Pitch-In Network which comprises four major UK Universities.  https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/business/supporting-business/pitch-in.

Traditionally, mass-customisation was considered economically unfeasible. However the emergence and maturation of the interfacing of cyber and physical objects through the Internet of Things, digital manufacturing and cloud-computing tools encourage the idea that manufacturing for mass customisation is increasingly economically viable. The IoT could be used specifically to harvest users' data, from which parameters for the customisation of consumers' goods could be automatically derived and sent to production. However, as the diffusion of IoT is still not ubiquitous and its diffusion and exploitation requires high investments, companies would benefit from understanding under what circumstances such investments would pay off. This project will support the implementation of IoT for mass customisation in consumers' goods by providing a tool to guide in the decision of which type of product or service customisation proposition would more successfully rely on customisation parameters gathered from the IoT.