Hyper Island is very proud to have Volvo Group as a main partner of our school. Since 2018, Volvo has enabled our organization and in particularly our Learning Partnerships team to pursue projects with ambitious challenges that have encouraged out students to enter into the stretch zone 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 truly a “real-world ready” experience for our students, and at the same time, a unique opportunity for Volvo Group to partner with future talent and drive change and prosperity for their company, as well as in their industry.
Through our partnership, we can lead the change together and not only stay relevant, but be in the forefront of innovation and sustainable development.
Hyper Island’s student projects allow our students to get practical insights into advanced high-tech business environments and also work on important purpose-driven projects. These can include challenges such as lowering carbon footprint and how the industry can affect and lower environmental impact with innovative ideas. They also gain a deeper understanding of complex value chains, organizational structures, and industry ecosystems.
Each year, we do a big cross-program sprint as part of our learning collaboration that exists with Volvo Group. This is when we bring students from different programs with different skills and competences together to collaborate and work on a real-world business challenge. The sprint often kicks off the new cycle of our collaboration and the insights and ideas that are sprung from the sprint can then filter down into other projects throughout the school year. For our latest sprint, Volvo Group is looking for the next generation services and solutions to manage and reduce carbon footprint in goods transportation. For this specific sprint, we involved students from our Business Developer, Digital Creative and AI Business Consultant programs.
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.
The challenge was posed to our students: how can we support firms to monitor, prevent, reduce, or offset greenhouse gas emissions for goods transport with true transparency? When it comes to the ideation process, the students are not alone. Volvo Group is there throughout the process to lend their advice in response to the students’ perspectives.
This is what the winning team, Team 21, had to say:
Director Business Innovation & Foresight at Volvo Group, Hans Lind, also found the collaboration with Hyper Island students to be very valuable.
If the winning ideas are good enough, there’s every possibility that they can be taken further. Take last year’s winners for example, they were invited to pitch their idea to the Innovation Council at Volvo. Their idea got funded, and a Volvo team worked on refining the idea. It has since contributed to a solution that is now being tested with users and customers.
Watch a film about our previous Hack Sprint with Volvo Group
Head of Learning Partnerships at Hyper Island, Pernilla Hallberg has witnessed the true value of the partnership for both the collaborating company and Hyper Island students.
A continuous development for future changemakers
The Hack Sprint has been in full flow for a few years now, and based on the statement made by Pernilla that “success is made in the direct collaboration with the students”, as well as our joint learnings, Hyper Island is continuously developing its collaboration. Things to look forward to this school-year are, for example, our Shared Exploration project that we’ll do together with the students from our Data Analyst program , who will be provided with data by Volvo Group. The Shared Exploration will run for five months and include open exploration, coaching sessions, insights, and findings. This will all result in formulated problem statements based on the students’ exploration and Volvo Group’s business needs, where the students can use the data to solve actual challenges and provide insights and strategic recommendations for innovation and development.
Looking further to the future, there will of course be more sprints, and also other longer projects. Already in December, 2021 we’re running a second sprint with our Business Developer students connected to the value chain of Volvo Trucks and Group Strategy.
If you’re interested in finding out more about Learning Partnerships at Hyper Island, click here.