Ideas for a new industry: the Industry 4.0 Student…

 

 

The award ceremony for the fourth edition of the Industry 4.0 Student Contest, promoted by Digital Industries World, was met with much satisfaction, toasts and customary photos.

The competition saw students compete with innovative projects and creative solutions over a period of about six months, reaching its conclusion on Friday 27 June.

The final event was held at the MADE Competence Center I4.0, a national reference point for the digital transformation of the manufacturing industry.

The contest was conceived by Digital Industries World, a global ecosystem of multidisciplinary companies and institutions committed to the digital transformation of the manufacturing industry. This year, it was organised in collaboration with the Department of Management Engineering at Politecnico di Milano, the Politecnico di Milano Foundation, the University of Bergamo, the University of Brescia, and LIUC – the Catholic University of Castellanza (VA).

The competition aims to train tomorrow’s Industry 4.0 and IoT engineers, beginning with training on current market trends. Alongside a university course, Digital Industries World and the partners of the initiative believe it is important to give the next generation the chance to work in real teams developing innovative business solutions and promoting the sustainable growth of companies.

Ten projects were presented, divided into two areas of intervention: Human-centred production and smart production. The titles of the participating projects are as follows: CobotCare, Digital Twin Bio-Aware AR+, FRED, Humetrix, Logistics Optimisation with AI and Blockchain, MILO (Manufacturing Intelligence and Learning Operator), Mood-Aware Factory, SmartFault, SmartFlow, and Smart Slicing 4.0.

The ranking was drawn up by a jury of professionals and experts, composed of the initiative’s partners and delegates from companies associated with the Digital Industries World network. The overall winner prize was awarded to the Smart Slicing 4.0 project by the D-Task team, comprising students Andrea Messina, Davide Marcandelli, Kevin Pezzotta, Simone Morotti and Tecla Pennisi. The project focuses on adapting existing production lines for meat cutting using IoT and advanced computing to enable accurate slicing based on weight. The idea is to integrate real-time weighing in order to minimise alterations to declared values, reduce waste caused by incorrect cuts and cut down on rework resulting from cuts exceeding tolerance thresholds.

All participants in the ten projects will receive an Amazon voucher and will soon have the opportunity to visit the MFL Group plant in Molteno, Lecco.

“Now in its fourth edition, the contest is a regular event for Politecnico di Milano students who want to test themselves by developing innovative ideas based on advanced technologies, such as those of Industry 4.0,” said Adalberto Polenghi, a researcher at the university and the contest’s scientific director. Students can thus enrich the skills they have acquired during their engineering studies with practical experience, giving rise to concrete and original projects. The aim is to stimulate technical creativity and contribute to training future leaders in the industrial world who are ready to drive innovation in Italian and international companies.’

Registration for the 2026 contest will open soon, and the fifth edition promises to be even more popular.

For more information: Digital Industries World – Global Human Network

At Politecnico di Milano during Milan Fashion Week, students…

In a week when attention was focused on runways, collections and creative direction, a group of students from the High-End and Luxury Industries Management Master’s programme at Politecnico di Milano proposed shifting the focus to what lies behind the product: supply chains, artisanal skills and relationships between brands and suppliers.

Rethinking the value of luxury in a more equitable way

The manifesto, entitled “Future of Luxury: Resilient, Sustainable and Human-Centric Supply Chains”, was developed during a workshop coordinated by Professor Hakan Karaosman, Professor Jinou Xu and PhD candidate Lyven Mariana Leal Chagas and brings together eleven principles for rethinking the luxury industry in a more equitable, transparent and people-centred way.

According to the students, the value of luxury does not lie exclusively in the final product, but in the processes that make it possible: in intergenerational know-how, in dignity of work across the supply chain and in the ability to redistribute value more evenly among all the parties involved. The document proposes moving beyond purely transactional models and encouraging more collaborative relationships between brands and suppliers, placing fairness in decision-making and incentives at the centre.

Innovation, sustainability and generational vision

Considerable space is also dedicated to the relationship between technology and creativity. Artificial intelligence is described as a tool capable of optimising processes and freeing up time for high-value creative work, provided that it does not replace but rather supports the human contribution.

The manifesto also addresses the tension between environmental sustainability and social sustainability, highlighting how the two dimensions are deeply interconnected and cannot be treated separately. For the younger generations preparing to enter the sector, the competitive future of luxury will depend on the ability to build resilient, inclusive supply chains genuinely oriented towards the long term.

Click here to read the manifesto.

The manifesto was co-authored by Giovanni Barraco, Martina Andreani, Andrea Romizi, Giulia Mazzetti, Marina Tasca, Andrea Caruso, Giada Tittarelli, Elisa Aiello, Roberta Sorbera, Filippo Guerra and Isabella Martinetti.

Students from the “Invest in Foreign Markets” Lab among…

Once again, students from Prof. Stefano Elia’s “Invest in Foreign Markets“ Lab were among the highest-performing teams in the X-Culture competition, confirming the excellence of the Master’s Degree Programme in Management Engineering.

The competition takes place both face-to-face and remotely over eight weeks. Participants work together in multicultural teams to develop an internationalisation project for the participating companies.

The 2025-1 edition involved 5.832 students from 161 universities in 141 countries and spanning six continents. Participants were divided into 1.121 global virtual teams, each comprising an average of six members from different academic and cultural backgrounds.

During the project, each team developed a strategic internationalisation plan for a real company, culminating in the presentation of a final report. A total of 1.002 reports were submitted to the jury.

A commission of 180 international experts — comprising university professors and business coaches from 41 countries — was tasked with evaluating the projects. Each report was analysed independently by the commission according to criteria such as creativity, clarity of presentation, feasibility of the proposed solutions, stylistic quality, and overall coherence. Each project was examined by between three and seven experts, who also provided qualitative feedback.

At the end of the selection process, the 18 teams that performed best were identified, with one team selected for each participating client company. These teams included three groups of students from the “Invest in Foreign Markets” Lab, which was coordinated by Prof. Stefano Elia, who teaches on the Master’s Degree Course in Management Engineering.

The academic tutors, Ludovico Benetel and Alessio Di Marco, who are both former students of the Master’s Degree Course in Management Engineering, as well as Virginia Vassallo and Jeanne D’Arc, made a decisive contribution by supporting the teams with competence and dedication throughout the competition.

In recognition of the high quality of education provided and the excellent results achieved, the academic team received the prestigious 2025-1 X-Culture Global Educator Award, joining the top 50 professors worldwide.

This is a highly prestigious result that testifies to the solidity of the educational pathway and the high level of internationalisation of the Master’s Degree Course in Management Engineering.

Further details on the initiative can be found here:

2025-1 Best Teams
2025-1 Best Professors

Coming this September: the 6th edition of “Percorsi Assisi”.…

From September 1st to 7th, 2025, the Percorsi Assisi school returns. The School offers an educational experience that combines study and relational living. Now in its sixth year, this inter-university and interdisciplinary program is organised for the 6th year by the Politecnico di Milano and 7 other Italian universities together with the Sacro Convento di Assisi.

Targeted at university students, PhD candidates, and young workers, the School promotes an interdisciplinary study of current themes, taking into account the complexity of reality, with its potential and challenges. The methodology alternates training with lectures and seminars, group activities, company visits and recreational cultural moments, including discovering some of the most significant sites in and around Assisi.

This edition will focus on the theme “One Health. Ecosystems, people, and environments in dialogue”. The One Health approach promotes a systemic vision that goes beyond disciplinary boundaries, reshaping how we understand global well-being. It envisions ecosystems, human communities and social systems as interconnected parts of a single, unified organism. This framework invites researchers, social workers and policymakers to rethink strategies for inclusion, support and resilience.

Registrations will be open until June 29, 2025. The school is held in Italian.

For more information, please visit the official website:https://percorsiassisi.it/.
Instagram page of Percorsi Assisi: https://www.instagram.com/percorsi_assisi/

10 Thesis for Sustainability

10 Theses for Sustainability is the initiative promoted by the Symbola Foundation, Luiss and Unioncamere, with the support of Deloitte Climate & Sustainability, and realised in collaboration with the Almalaurea Inter-University Consortium, the RUS – Network of Universities for Sustainable Development and the INSTM – National Inter-University Consortium for Materials Science and Technology, under the patronage of the CRUI – Conference of Italian University Rectors and the Ministry of Universities and Research.

Many fields of knowledge are focusing on sustainability, making it the leitmotif of this century: from engineering to literature, from economics to political science. The initiative was a great success, with 2,062 applications from over 86 universities across Italy (62% female, 38% male). The 10 winners (6 women and 4 men) come from Campus Bio-medico in Rome, Luiss, Politecnico di Milano, Politecnico di Torino, Università Ca’ Foscari in Venice, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Università degli Studi di Catania, Università degli Studi di Palermo and Università Politecnica delle Marche. There are also 90 special mentions.

As stated in the announcement, the evaluation of the theses was carried out in two stages: a technical committee composed of the 22 universities participating in the call, including the Politecnico di Milano, which selected the 100 most deserving theses, and a scientific committee chaired by Professors Severino and Zamagni, which selected the 10 winners.

Among the 10 winners is a graduate of the Politecnico di Milano: Andrea Fumagalli, who obtained a Master’s degree in Management Engineering with his thesis ‘Assessing the environmental impact of photovoltaic technologies: a Life Cycle Assessment-based evaluation framework and its application to multiregional scenarios’. The thesis focuses on photovoltaics (PV), a key technology for the decarbonisation of the energy sector, but which requires up-to-date assessments of its environmental sustainability. The study develops a new assessment framework to compare the impact of the six main PV technologies on energy and greenhouse gas emission indicators. The results show that no single technology excels in all aspects, and that the production phase and the carbon intensity of the producing country significantly influence the environmental impact. The study highlights the critical role of PV in addressing climate change and the importance of material recycling and decarbonisation of the electricity supply chain.