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Innovation

PIAGGIO FAST FORWARD:
THE MAJOR INNOVATION PROJECT
FROM THE PIAGGIO GROUP

Piaggio Fast Forward (PFF) is a major innovation project by the Piaggio Group, the European leader in two-wheeled vehicles and the most prominent global player among western manufacturers, as well as a key presence in the light commercial vehicle sector. One of the most historic and prestigious names in Italian industry, Piaggio was founded in December 1884. 2015 is its 130th year of life. PFF was established to come up with a new way of conducting research, with the aim of interpreting the signs of change and coming up with intelligent solutions to the problems and the new demands of the future.

PFF Manifesto

Piaggio Fast Forward was created in 2015 as a new company established and owned by the Piaggio Group. Integrating innovative technologies and coming up with future transportation projects, PFF aims to study new mobility platforms to respond to the challenges of the rapid changes now taking place in the world, the ongoing development and growing complexity of big urban centres that are destined to become megalopolises with populations in the tens of millions in the years to come, facing the issue of how to transport people and cargo while respecting the environment and improving the quality of life of the citizens of our planet.

LABORATORIO DI IDEE, TEAM MULTICULTURALE

The resource PFF starts out with is the quality of the minds on its team: brilliant young students from Harvard and MIT, coordinated by Beth Altringer (psychologist, designer, and professor at Harvard’s Engineering & Design School) and Sasha Hoffman (co-founder of Fuzzy Compass, an active member of the Boston Entrepreneurship Ecosystem).

PFF believes that bringing together very different minds, with multicultural experiences and origins, to talk about things together can lead to a more complete vision of how the world is destined to evolve in the area of mobility in the years to come. Piaggio Fast Forward is a workshop for ideas that doesn’t fit into the engineering schemes typical of industry, which will be capable of providing new keys to the interpretation of problems in transportation, opening up a whole range of new opportunities unknown to us now in the world of conventional mobility.

For Piaggio Fast Forward, innovation is the way forward for sustainable economic development. PFF is based in an outstanding location: Cambridge (Massachusetts, United States), where research, university, visions of the future, technology and enterprise come together and have a positive impact on one another.

BOARDS INTERNAZIONALI

Piaggio Fast Forward is guided by an Advisory Board and by a Board of Directors. The Advisory Board includes Roberto Colaninno (Chairman and CEO of the Piaggio Group), Nicholas Negroponte (Co-founder of the MIT Media Lab and Professor of Media Technology at MIT), Doug Brent (Vice President of Technology Innovation at Trimble) and Jeff Linnell (Google, founder of Bot & Dolly). The Board of Directors of PFF includes Chairman Michele Colaninno (CEO and Managing Directo of the Immsi Group, which controls a majority of the Piaggio Group, and Director of Piaggio & C. S.p.A.), with Chief Executive Officer Jeffrey Schnapp (Professor at Harvard University, Founder and Director of metaLAB (at) Harvard University), and Chief Creative Officer Greg Lynn (Founder of Greg Lynn FORM, Professor of Architecture at UCLA and Davenport Professor at Yale University); the PFF Board also includes Gabriele Galli (General Manager Finance of the Piaggio Group), Davide Zanolini (Marketing and Communications Director of the Piaggio Group), Luca Sacchi (Head of Strategic Innovation for the Piaggio Group), Miguel Galluzzi (Head of the Piaggio Advanced Design Center in Pasadena) and Edoardo Ducci of Piaggio Group Americas.

Piaggio Fast Forward is an ambitious project that will help the Piaggio Group develop, in concert with its own Research and Development Centres all over the world, increasingly high-tech, innovative products which respond to consumers’ changing needs: the key to all future development. At the same time, the Piaggio Group will contribute the international reputation it has built up in its 130 year history, not only through production and distribution all over the world of products such as Vespa – a brand that has achieved world-wide success with more than 18 million vehicles sold so far all over the world – but also and above all with its direct industrial presence in Europe, China, India and Vietnam, its deep knowledge and profound respect for its employees and consumers, cutting-edge design and deeply rooted business culture developed in loyal cooperation with local communities. The Piaggio Group, the first to come up with the concept of light mobility, is now a world leader in the development and construction – with consistent, constant commitment – of some of the world’s most technologically advanced vehicles for individual travel, demonstrating respect for the environment with new generation engines that balance sustainability, efficiency and control of consumption.

With the aim of developing innovation, the Piaggio Group has decided to launch and support Piaggio Fast Forward: a great laboratory for forward-looking, open minds. A plural, multicultural, multidisciplinary project combining history, research, design and industry.

INFO:
www.piaggiofastforward.com