You write the brief with us in two calls and put two of your people in the room. Eight practitioners from across the value chain, plus two of our engineers, spend 30 hours on your problem from two different angles. You keep every write-up, you own nothing you did not already own, and it costs no money.
Almost nothing PPWR asks for can be solved inside a single organisation. A fibre-first redesign needs a substrate specialist, a converter, a designer and the brand owner who knows the line speed and the cost per unit. Assembling those four normally means three NDAs, a procurement cycle and a year of diaries, and by then it is 2028.
Two teams work your problem independently and never see each other’s approach until the demo floor. The comparison is the deliverable. One answer tells you what is possible. Two tell you which constraint was actually binding, which is the thing you cannot buy from a consultancy.
Eight competitors across the two teams, from four different disciplines, plus an AmPhi Labs engineer embedded in each. Thirty hours with no other agenda, no status deck, no steering committee and nobody protecting a budget line.
Stating a problem in public with the constraints attached forces a clarity that internal decks avoid. Several of our clients get more from the two brief-writing calls than from anything that follows. You keep that document either way.
The teams own what they build, equally. We take no licence, partners get none, and nothing is assigned to anybody. You keep every write-up, dataset annotation and measured result from the work on your brief, and you are free to take any of it forward with whoever you like.
Converters, substrate and coating specialists, print and recyclability people are in the teams as competitors, not as vendors. You watch them work before you ever ask them for a price.
Results are published in the days before the industry week opens and again in the December report. A brand that put an unsolved problem on the table in 2026 reads very differently from one that published a target.
Three challenge owner slots, one per track. No fee in either direction.
Every team crosses at least three organisations. No two direct competitors sit together, and one of our engineers is embedded in each.
Knows the assortment, the line speed, the cost per unit and what procurement will sign. Any level, as long as they own the problem. Without this seat the team optimises a fantasy.
Structural, packaging, graphic or service design. Most of what the 2030 rules change is form, material and how a pack reads on a shelf.
Substrate, converter, press and digital print, ink and coating, labels, recyclability assessment or regulatory, matched to your brief. The two teams get complementary specialists.
From TU Delft, Wageningen or the UvA, any discipline. Does the making, and asks the question nobody in the room has asked in fifteen years.
One of our engineers sits in each team: data, code, CAD, rapid prototyping. They build what the team decides, they compete for nothing and they take no share of a prize. If your brief needs a model trained or a dataset wrangled overnight, that is who does it.
Enough that a measured result means something. Usually a real assortment with volumes, dimensions, materials and a cost baseline. Names and prices can be masked, and we help you decide what to strip in the second brief-writing call. A sanitised dataset that nobody can compute against produces a nice photograph and nothing else.
The team owns it, all four of them equally. We take no licence, partners get none, and nothing is assigned to us or to you. You keep every write-up and measurement from your track, and if you want to take a solution into production you talk to the team that made it, or commission the build from us. Background IP that you brought stays yours throughout.
Partners fund tracks and supply toolkits. They do not write briefs, and no partner employee competes in the track their employer funds. We tell you which partners are attached to your track before you commit, and if a specific company is a problem for you, say so and we place them elsewhere.
Yes, and several conversations are heading that way. The two roles are separate: the challenge owner slot costs nothing and buys you the work on your problem, the partner tier buys toolkit inclusion, seats and stage. Holding both does not buy you more influence over the judging, because no partner judges the track it funds.
We build it. An AmPhi Labs AI/ML engineer takes it forward with a €5,000 build fund covering engineering time, model tokens, licences and compute, and it ends in a demo to you, the challenge owner whose brief it answered. If you want it in production it is a commissioned build and we quote it like any other project. If you do not, it goes into the December report and nobody owes anybody.
Forty-five minutes. Bring the problem in whatever state it is in. We will tell you honestly whether 30 hours and ten people can move it, and if not, we will say so.
The go decision is 15 September. Briefs are written through September and published with the applications.
