A Major Car Manufacturer Comes to EPFL
Concept car Citroën © Citroën
PSA Peugeot Citroën is announcing its arrival on the campus of the Ecole polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL). The French automaker will be the eleventh major company to move into business-oriented Innovation Square since the space opened in August 2010.
PSA Peugeot Citroën is settling into the heart of EPFL campus. At a November 3 press conference in Paris, the French automaker publicly announced that it is setting up an innovation unit called StelLab@EPFL. The new unit will be located in Innovation Square, where it will join other multinationals such as Logitech, Nokia, Constellium, and Nestlé. “The mission of this innovative structure is to foster a long-term vision for PSA Peugeot Citroën’s products and services,” the group announced in a press release.
EPFL conducts a great deal of research that is of interest to the auto industry, in a wide range of different fields. For example, the Materials Sciences and Engineering Institute works to create light, sturdy composites; several robotics-oriented laboratories are designing and producing all sorts of mechanisms to help with driving and move toward ever-increasing comfort and safety for users and their environment; and there are a large number of projects that aim to replace fossil fuels in the transportation systems of the future, both by storing energy in various forms (new electric batteries, hydrogen, and even compressed air) and by using it with greater efficiency.
More and more often, industry is seeking to locate close to the laboratories that are turning out tomorrow’s technologies. “Companies are coming to EPFL because they know that there they will be at the wellspring of innovative ideas,” explains Adrienne Corboud-Fumagalli, the EPFL’s Vice-President for Innovation and Technology Transfer.
In just a little over a year, Innovation Square has brought together 11 major companies on the Lausanne campus. With the StelLab@epfl the auto industry, which exercices a large R&D budget, is now represented as well. EPFL and PSA Peugeot Citroën are expecting that this will encourage future collaboration between research and industrial environments.