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. The Shape of Things to Come is the first #event presenting this project. Where could it be held but in Italy, where the Piaggio Group is based; and who could it have as its audience - both physically in Milan, and by streaming all over the world – but thousands of university students: the future of the world, of society and of thought. #PiaggioFastForward 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.
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.
#PiaggioFastForward 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. Piaggio Fast Forward sees innovation as the path to sustainable development of the economy.
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.
Piaggio Fast Forward is guided by an Advisory Board and a Board of Directors. The Advisory Board includes Roberto Colaninno (Chairman and Chief Executive Officer 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 with Trimble) and Jeff Linnell (Google, founder of Bot & Dolly).
The Piaggio Fast Forward Board of Directors includes Chairman Michele Colaninno (Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director of the Immsi Group, which owns the majority share in the Piaggio Group, and Director of Piaggio & C. S.p.A.), with Chief Executive Officer Jeffrey Schnapp 2 (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 with the Piaggio Group), Davide Zanolini (Marketing and Communications Director with the Piaggio Group), Luca Sacchi (Head of Strategic Innovation with 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