While we see growing market for intralogistics services and technologies due to the increased need of handling in several industries (high mix/low volume -manufacturing, tailoring, JIT/JIS/JIR, growing number of SKUs, ecommerce, recycling etc.), we have also realised that often the cases are not that an individual company can solve them alone. Whether the question is to develop a new technology or adapt existing solutions into operations, it requires collaboration among several stakeholders.
LIMOWA representatives had an opportunity to join Zero4 Symposium held at Konecranes HQ Finland on 9th Oct 2025. The main theme of this event was “The Future of Intralogistics”, and because we understand nowadays, that innovation require collaboration, a broad set of companies, consultants, as well as, academics and other stakeholders for innovation were invited to join and contribute not topic. Zero4 itself aims to tackle our societies’ grand challenges Productivity, Emissions and Safety by reaching zero GHG emissions, information barriers, wasted energy and incidents. A number of projects either internal or collaborative will help Konecranes to achieve these ambitious goals.
Mikael Haag Research Fund Manager at Konecranes said: “Material handling continues to digitalize, and the breathtaking developments in AI demand even greater data and end-to-end integrations.” Although lots of tech are already available for them, we in LIMOWA agree also, that there exist lots of issues to be solved further from interoperability to integrations, as well as, from adaption to trainings and further development.
The event itself was focused mostly on findings from several subprojects such as AiWo, HiFive, VAMOS etc. organized by Finnish Universities Aalto, Tampere, Jyväskylä, Oulu, and Lahti-Lappeenranta in addition to VTT under Konecranes’ Zero4 Flagship Project umbrella.
We in LIMOWA believe, that we should continue that kind of collaboration, and we are eager to help industry and other stakeholders to develop a World-Class Logistics Laboratory where we can innovate new solutions together, test them and train people to use them in order to achieve even better performance. Furthermore, we are happy to state further, that although our focus is to help Finnish companies, we also need Europeanwide collaboration to integrate all together in logistics supply chain in ETP on Logistics ALICE (Alliance for Logistics Innovation through Collaboration in Europe) where we are creating a development forum for intralogistics innovations in addition that great attempts done in other forums such as FMA, EFFRA etc.
Like Konecranes, we would like to call this co-innovation project, as we have done earlier with other stakeholders too. They see that co-innovation projects might help them further in their technology vision. We are happy to be involved – together with our other members and partners in this journey. There exist several keywords that might help us to prepare the forthcoming Horizon Europe proposals together with Konecranes and several other key stakeholders – is Your organisation also interested in to join?
LIMOWA is running a LOBRA (Logistics Laboratory) project to study logistics innovation facilities and promote them further. LOBRA is co-funded by European Union ERDF.
More information concerning LOBRA:
hannu.tapio@limowa.fi
+358-50-4684610
