The contest: a partnership between Amazon and technical universities

The Innovation award is a contest launched by Amazon in 2016 in partnership with the Politecnico di Milano. Its first edition involved 193 first year students of the Master of Science in Management, Economics and Industrial Engineering who presented 39 projects suggesting possible innovation of Amazon Logistics processes.

Following last year success, in 2017 the Innovation Award will be relaunched in Milan and extended for the first time to other universities in Rome and Turin, areas in which Amazon is going to open its new fulfillment centers (FCO1 and MXP3) and AMZL delivery stations. Politecnico di Torino, Università di Torino and Università degli Studi di Roma “Tor Vergata” will host the second edition of the Innovation Award that will follow the same model developed in Milan and will involve students who are focusing their studies on logistics and transportation. While the first edition was mainly focused on the operations, this year Amazon will ask students to face the logistics challenge of the “last mile”.

All the universities involved will follow the same model for the contest, presenting the same challenge to their students. The only substantial difference will involve the Turin edition that will be a pilot for Amazon since it will open to students attending not only engineering courses. The aim of the pilot is to experiment the potential benefit coming from a proactive cooperation between students with a different study path.

With the Innovation Award, Amazon intends to stress that innovation and working for Amazon Logistics is cool, targeting students of the best Italian universities.

Contest structure
Students who will join the contest will be invited to develop an original project consisting of innovative ideas and suggestions about the challenge called “Last Mile”.

Presentation
The project will be presented on 29 of March in AULA LEONARDO (2:00 pm), hosted by the course of Analisi dei Sistemi Finanziari – Ingegneria Gestionale

Evaluation
Amazon will evaluate the projects with a focus on the business impact taking into account the following leading criteria the top-five proposals for each university:
1. Feasibility
2. Scalability
3. Customer impact
4. Technology applicability
In addition to Amazon leadership principles:
5 – Think big
6 – Invent and simplify
7 – Insist on the highest standard
8 – Dive deep
Members of the Amazon Logistics committee in charge to evaluate the students’ projects will be: Gabriele Sigismondi (AMZL Director IT), Stefano Perego (Amazon Operations Director – UK) and John Tagawa (AMZL Director EU).

Award
The Winning team from each university will be awarded with a free 5-days journey to Seattle, at the heart of Amazon Group (September 2017).
The awarded journey includes one-day visit at Amazon headquarters where they will discover all the main innovation the company in testing to solve the last mile challenge. Moreover, students will also have the chance to present their projects to an AMZL executive (i.e. Tim Collins).
Members of the second and third ranked team will be awarded a kindle each.  Between the local winning team, Amazon will choose the first national winner of the Innovation Award that will be awarded with a desk signed by Jeff Bezos.​