Swiss Post opens its PostLab at EPFL
Swiss Post has strengthened its partnership with the Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL).
By opening its incubator (PostLab) on the EPFL campus, it is clearly signalling its intention to be one of Switzerland’s innovation pioneers. Alongside high-tech companies, it will work in close collaboration with the school, its researchers and its students.
Using the incubator concept, PostLab will offer financing to develop projects that have strong potential and to help put them to a specific use. This concept helps reduce the time between the generation of an idea and its realization. This means greater efficiency, faster development of services and increased motivation for all partners who can witness the result of their contribution.
Led by Lorenz Lehmann of Swiss Post, PostLab is not only aimed at EPFL researchers, but also at students with good ideas as well as collaborators from other academic institutions.
Many research topics developed at EPFL represent solid prospects for Swiss Post’s business development. The security of electronic financial transactions is one area that is constantly evolving. Security of this kind will permit the development of new services in areas such as cellular telephony. The goal is to give users freedom and convenience, not to impede their activity. Another topic area is transportation logistics, which have to incorporate many parameters these days to achieve speed, traceability, cost savings and environmental responsibility, while enabling the short-term planning of transportation resources. This challenge calls for research in the fields of management, logistics, mathematics, electronics and many other leading disciplines. Advances in artificial intelligence also constitute a particularly fertile source of innovation.
These are just a few examples. “I have already visited many laboratories, but I know that we still have a great deal of knowledge to discover here on the EPFL campus,” explains Lorenz Lehmann. This pleases the CEO of Swiss Post, Ulrich Gygi, for whom “innovation is crucial to long-term survival. It’s a culture we want to reinforce, not just to grow our basic business but also to offer new services and become even more attractive on the job market.”
Next to Ulrich Gygi during PostLab’s inauguration at EPFL, Patrick Aebischer, the school’s president, stressed that “the school is particularly proud to be cooperating with an enterprise that serves all Swiss. This helps us fulfil one of our mandates, which is to help society derive the greatest possible benefit from our laboratory work.” Jan-Anders Månson, vice-president of EPFL, stated that the scientific areas of interest to Swiss Post appear particularly stimulating to a number of research groups on campus.
Since 2002, EPFL and Swiss Post have been partners in the fields of research, training and knowledge transfer, thanks to a chair entitled Management of network industries (MIR). With the creation of PostLab, the two partners are now taking an additional step. PostLab will be temporarily located in the College of Management of Technology while waiting for space in the future innovation district.
