Innovite Volvo IT

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Re-thinking the way we design trucks

The other day I stumbled upon this innovative design by Izhar Gafni: a bike made out cardboard (see featured image). The bike weighs 9 kg, can stand more than 200 kg and cost 9 $ to manufacture.

This got me thinking. In regards to the Volvo Group and its strong objectives such as a “revenue growth by 50% in the APAC region and 25% in Africa” it would be interesting to re-think completely the way Volvo designs its products in order to capture new market shares in emerging markets. This of course is already partially addressed today by doing what we call “reverse engineering” and “frugal innovation”. Big automotive players spend indeed part of their R&D expenses into re-thinking how to adapt product development to the bare needs of the emerging markets.

But we are quite often blinded by what we already know and low-cost commercial vehicles are still quite similar to traditional products. Why not take Gafni’s approach and take the opportunity to innovate completely on the way we design our trucks?

I guess what I’m getting at is: when will we see a Volvo “Cardboard Truck” on the roads ?

The Auto Tech That Mattered at CES – copied from Wired

Illustration: Ross Patton/Wired

After 4 days following the latest innovations at CES 2013, I was thinking of making a recap of what has been shown on the automotive side. Luckily or unluckily enough, Wired just beated me to it by posting an article on just that yesterday. While you can find the article reblogged just below, I’d like to bring my two cents to the article.

This year as definitely been the year where the connected car was in the spotlight: Ford with OpenXC & GM with MyLink invited developers to improve the driver experience in their cars. Obviously, connected vehicle applications will have to be safe, reliable, and non-distracting: directly taking the mobile interface as is and mirror it in the car will not suffice to convince consumers. All is in the driving experience.

Commercial vehicles as fast followers of what’s happening on the car market will also have to adapt to that trend where the technology that the driver will bring with him in the vehicle will out-date the existing on-board technology fairly quickly. The trick will be therefore to either enable upgradable/modular hardware in the vehicle or facilitate connectivity of the vehicle with everyday consumer device.

Continue Reading →

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Internet of Things is here

If you regard mobile devices and computers as things then “Internet of Things” is already here. We will soon also see completely different “things” connected over the Internet, such as cars, thermostats and home equipment. All of them connected to Internet via wireless technology.

Some examples:

What will the next step be?
More and cheaper sensors will hit the markets. They can sense temperature, vibrations, location and much more and are connected to each others and to the Internet.

Two examples are IBM‘s project Smarter Planet and HP’s project CeNSE (Central Nervous System of the Earth). Now we are talking about millions or billions of low cost sensors connected to each other and to Internet spread out all over the earth.

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A Japanese Experience

Two weeks ago, Tommy Hansson, Aaron Hung and I were in Japan (Tokyo) to kick-off a business prototype together with our colleague overseas responsible for the APAC region. Continue Reading →

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Big Data – a problem or a promise?

The term “Big Data” is not well defined. It’s a buzzword used in many different ways for different reasons. I often notice a confusion between what is data and what is information. A huge lot of data doesn’t mean that we have a huge lot of information. The data is just ones and zeros or other ways to represent information but it is not information until we interpret the data into something understandable into our brains.

According to the analysis firm Gartner the amount of data in the world doubles every 18 months. That means that the last 18 months more data was generated than all other previous years combined. The question is how useful all this data is and how it can be utilized. Continue Reading →

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Innovation in Action 2012

Last week Volvo Information Technology co-hosted Innovation in Action 2012with partners including Tetra Pak, Ikea, SCA, and Ericsson to name a few. The summit, in its third year, was organised by the Innovation Pioneers Network with ten workshops run by the hosts over two days. Over two hundred people participated, mainly from other firms but also members from universities, start-ups and government. We were excited also to see a few others from the Volvo Group in attendance! Continue Reading →

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China and back!

Now I have been back in Sweden for one week and I feel that I need express some of the experiences that I have from the three month stay in Beijing.

Aaron and I at Computex in Tai Pei

Collegues at our office in Tianjin

We, Aaron and I, worked very intense to connect with interesting and valuable customers, colleagues and partners in China – enabling new networks and creating new capabilities for innovations to spur.

One great memory is our Innovation event in Shanghai on which we had the great luck to interact with some curious customers and technology providers from the region. More information at Volvo IT@Facebook

Some short reflections to sum-up the people in China and the city of Beijing

Warm people that loves children
High pace city that never sleeps
Great stable weather with a lot of sunshine
Risk taking occurs everyday in the traffic
Working in tall buildings gives you time to reflect and interact while waiting for and in elevators – creates time for innovation
Everything is big
Great food!!
Many technology providers that you never heard of before
Many innovative vehicles and methods for people and goods transports in the city
Parks are always full of people dancing and singing -creating energy for others
The land of big contrasts

The transition back to sweden has gone pretty well and right now we are planning for the upcoming innovation challenge – JAM IT. We will of course utilize our extended network of colleagues all around the world to find new ideas and to build cross functional knowledge within the corporation with the overall goal to generate net value to our customers.

I wish all of you some great months to come!

Smarter Check-in

A smarter check-in not only enables superior customer service during the meet & greet process, it also provides better data quality and faster process improvement.

RFID & NFC

Hotels, hospitals and airlines, which normally meet and greet a huge base of customers, are heading to employee RFID and NFC, connecting with customer’s smartphones to enable a smoother and faster check-in.

Upon arrival of the airport, customers are allowed to check in at a kiosk, where frequent flyers are equipped with an RFID-enabled wireless bag tag, with detailed information which can then be sent to their phones. Continue Reading →

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Giving life to an Idea!

Guest blogger: Santosh Harakamani at Volvo IT in Bangalore, India. Santosh provided one of the winning ideas in our yearly innovation JAM!

It was reflection time for me at the end of a successful daylong workshop with Customer. A great day spent across the table with Customer; sharing the growth path, vision, strategy and more eager than us to try the prototype involving their customer and customer’s customer! It was a rare occasion when head of sales & marketing at customer and their regional teams spending full day with lots of energy and agreeing for the next joint plan.

Sounds like a good business meeting, just that it was not. The meeting was to discuss my idea “Telematics on School buses” selected at the JAM IT 2012. A proud moment seeing the idea has reached the customer to try the prototype jointly with VIT through a well-crafted and executed prototype model. Continue Reading →

QR codes – more than advertising?

I don’t know if you have noticed those small square, scrambled things that can be found in magazines, on billboards and products. They are called Quick Response (QR) codes and were initially developed by Toyota.

Japanese poster with QR codes (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

With the introduction of smartphones QR codes have suddenly become the holy grail of advertising, adding live content experiences to static paper.

But, is this the only use or could there maybe be other uses?

We decided to test QR codes as a means to minimize data input and increase efficiency. The prototype proved to be quite successful and we found several uses such as

Stock taking
Customer communication, both to and from
Connecting documentation to a specific physical part

QR codes Can Be Great When Done Right(socialhallucinations.com)

Top Posts & Pages

What will the next step be? More and cheaper sensors will hit the markets. They can sense temperature, vibrations, location and much more and are connected to each others and to the Internet.

Related articles

For those of you that are Volvo Group employees there is more information available on the intranet http://twbiserver.got.volvo.net:8092/wordpress/2012/04/quick-response/

Related articles

What will the next step be?
More and cheaper sensors will hit the markets. They can sense temperature, vibrations, location and much more and are connected to each others and to the Internet.