Innovation Project about logistics issues in Aviapolis area in City of Vantaa

During spring 2016, an innovation project group of 10 International Business and Logistics degree students conducted research for the Vantaa Business Development Center. Students divided themselves into three sub teams; market research team, benchmarking team and megatrends analysis team. Mrs. Anu Peltola, Business Advisor from city of Vantaa Aviapolis City- project and Business Development Services and Senior Lecturer Kaija Haapasalo defined and steered the project which started in January and ended in May. The project was a good learning opportunity, not just about new logistical issues, but as much about the challenges of project management and teamwork.

The market research team created a questionnaire to approx. 100 logistics companies located in Aviapolis area. These companies were provided to them by the Vantaa Business Development Center. Questionnaires were sent by email to the companies which were preselected by calling them in advance. The target of this approach was to increase the response rate. However, as always in projects, the timetable was too tight and the response rate remained very low. Despite of this, the students analysed the results well and supported the “current understanding” of the operating environment of Vantaa Business Development Services.

The group benchmarked airports and cities in Hong Kong, Australia China and the Netherlands, where so called Kasarda´s model of aerotropolis area is implemented. The target of this sub team was to add more valuable information to the development of Vantaa Aviapolis area as a future aerotropolis in Finland. Aerotropolis has an outstanding connectivity via highways, railways and extensive public transportation as well as an area surrounding the airport which includes infrastructure and services founded in “conventional cities”.

The purpose of the megatrends analysis was to identify global trends in logistics and to analyse which trends could be benefitting in the development of Aviapolis area. These trends were related to urbanization, sustainability, growth of E-commerce and computerization. To take a role of a facilitator for the new innovations was suggested to the city of Vantaa.

After reading the final project report and results, Anu Peltola, in role of the customer gave the students following feedback:

This project had many phases and faces which many times make projects more challenging to manage and implement. This project was no exception.  As a customer I am confident the project members gained a good understanding of the research process in general and gained understanding how challenging it is to generate and implement good & meaningful customer/market research survey. I am also confident that the students learned principles of the Areotropolis- concept, benchmarking of the cities and the megatrends in logistics (and how they could apply to Aviapolis). The customer wishes to thank all participants!

Project manager, Ilya Bezuglov, (IBL14 student), finds the innovation project experience very useful:

“Aviapolis project” was my first opportunity to be a project manager of a research project. Now, after five months of research and analysis, I can feel how much was done. Amazing experience of managing a team of bright and motivated students is something rare and unique. I have seen how my teammates were working, struggling, though achieving positive results at the end. This has given us confidence that we can deal with real-life projects.”

 

The photo features the project team with Mrs. Anu Peltola from City of Vantaa and Senior Lecturer Kaija Haapasalo at the Vantaa Business Development Center after the presentations. A few team members are already on their summer jobs and so missing from the picture.

For more information, please contact

Kaija Haapasalo
Senior Lecturer
kaija.haapasalo(at)metropolia.fi