Stora Enso OYJ : Young talents create intelligent packaging solutions

11/25/2016

Stora Enso is one of the seven partners in Accenture Digital Innovation Challenge (ADIC) in Finland this year. In the ADIC16, students and recent graduates team up to innovate digital solutions, new services, product concepts or business models to the real life business challenges of the partner companies and organisations.

​Stora Enso challenged students to create intelligent packaging solutions for handling of returns in apparel retail: how could our intelligent packaging solutions help retailers make handling of returns easier and more sustainable, and reduce return rates?

A team called Eco-Vangelists stood out with its pitch. The team consists of five university students, all currently studying in an exchange program in Finland. Leah Tremblay-Adams is an American, who studies Management in London, like also Yuzhen Yang from China. Valent Chiu-ying Cheung and Nevis Kam-Wing Lee come from City University of Hong Kong and study Global Business Systems Management, and Ying Zhou studies International Management in Sydney.

The Eco-Vangelists' new solution is to develop a secondary market for reselling apparel via reselling platform and smart lockers that can provide product authentication by sensors including NFC with intelligent apparel packaging.

Stora Enso's Intelligent Packaging team including Juha Maijala, Simo Siitonen and Maria Holopainen coached the students on different topics during a one month period prior to the ADIC16 finals. Their role was to support the team in developing their solution and to share market and business insights.

'We see tremendous potential in working with young talents like the Eco-Vangelists team. Their ADIC16 solution combines intelligent packaging technologies with new mobile phone readers and applications, and scalable cloud-based software solutions. Such an approach shows the way to groundbreaking intelligent packaging solutions', says Juha Maijala, Director Intelligent Packaging at Stora Enso, Division Consumer Board.
The Eco-Vangelists will compete against six other teams in the ADIC16 finals at the Slush technology conference in Helsinki to win the prize of 10 000 EUR.

Accenture Digital Innovation Challenge (ADIC) is a digital concept competition organized by Accenture and Fjord, together with startup and technology conference Slush. Slush is Europe's leading startup event, which brings together the high-end actors of the global tech scene to Helsinki.