Here you find news related to the i-SMILE project!
08.06.2022
Read about the first physical meeting in the newest blog post Face to Face At Last!
23.02.2022
Find the newest blog post written by Virva Tuomala on the themes of Innovation through Collaboration!
31.05.2021
Check out a new blog post written by Dr Yuan Virtanen about why should we care about urban last mile!
20.05.2021
Webinar: Freight bicycles – opportunities and challenges with deliveries in cities (12.04.2021)
The last mile of freight transport is the most costly, least efficient and most emission-intensive part. Now the transport of packages with freight bicycles has emerged as a cost-effective alternative in cities. The advantage is also less emissions and in some cases even faster transport.
Cykelcentrum (Bicycle centre) arranged a webinar with representatives from research, the municipality, users and manufacturers. Cykelcentrum highlighted both opportunities and challenges, and had the desire to create new contacts between academia, business and public actors to give development a boost. The webinar contained the researchers’ reflections on other presentations and discussions emerged from the participants in connection with all lectures.
Niklas Arvidsson, senior researcher at VTI and researcher in the i-SMILE-projects, had a presentation entitled “Light Electric Freight Vehicles as an enabler for innovative last mile transports”.
14.05.2021
The first i-SMILE workshop was successfully held online on 11th May 2021! The topic of this workshop was “The challenges of today for sustainable last mile deliveries in cities”. Participants included researchers, company representatives (both large global leaders and SMEs) and city officials from Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland. The program included four presentations and break-out group discussions on various topics. DHL Gothenburg (Sweden) and Amedia Distribution (Norway) shared their experience in the adoption and upscaling of light electric freight vehicles (LEFVs) for city distribution. Niklas Arvidsson from VTI (Sweden) presented a Nordic case study on the performance of LEFVs in the last mile, and Anna Aminoff from Hanken (Finland) introduced the concept of business models and environmental value propositions. The workshop concluded with a summary by Professor Britta Gammelgaard from Copenhagen Business School (Demark). We wish to thank all the participants for joining the first i-SMILE workshop and making it a success!
15.02.2021
Dr Yuan Virtanen has recently joined us as Project Researcher. She holds a D.Sc. degree in Economics and Business Administration from Aalto University School of Business (Finland). Her research interests include sustainable supply chains, role of intermediaries, global sourcing, and manufacturing location decisions. Her work has been published in internationally peer-reviewed academic journals and conferences such as International Journal of Production Research and Academy of Management Annual Meeting Proceedings.
10.02.2021
Read the recent project report conducted by Kien Do Trung, Janette Kotivirta, Viggo Norrell, and Britta Gammelgaard. Their comprehensive report investigates business model innovations in the logistics service industry. The strong growth in e-commerce causes many complex operational and environmental issues to stakeholders in the last mile system. You find the report under publications, here.
03.02.2021
Anna Aminoff from Hanken and Niklas Arvidsson from VTI hosted one breakout session at Sustainable Nordic Cities with focus on Climate smart mobility Conference on 3.2. The topic of the session was Light electric freight vehicles as enablers for innovative sustainable urban last mile. In this session we discussed about the possibilities of light electric freight vehicles (LEFVs) and as an extension automatized delivery vehicles in last-mile deliveries as an answer to some of these challenges. We discussed also about the role of cities and regions in facilitating this development.