AEI TÈXTILS kick off two new European Projects funded under the Eurocluster initiative: xBUILD-EU – Cross-fertilization of industrial ecosystems in textile manufacturing and construction leveraging digital and advanced technologies to build up green and digital resilience in Europe – coordinated by AEI Tèxtils, and EuroBoosTEX – Joint European Initiative in Textile Industry for Europe’s recovery boosting digital and green transition –where AEI Tèxtils has a partner role. The two projects are part of the 30 newly selected Euroclusters funded under the Joint Cluster Initiatives from the European Commission.

Both projects, co-funded under the Single Market Program program from the European Union, aim to facilitate networking opportunities to improve the resilience of the EU industrial textile ecosystem by strengthening cross-cluster interlinkages, fostering innovation capacities for the textile industry, to facilitate the adoption of processes and technologies to reinforce transformation into a greener and more digital economy, to foster up- and re-skilling of the textile industry workforce whilst attracting talents and lastly to boost internationalization by facilitating access to global value chains.

Each Eurocluster project will deploy a “cascade funding” mechanism to support textile SMEs in innovation, adoption of green and digital solutions and to go international with a lump-sum approach and eased application process. The first open calls are expected to be launched during May 2023. Other outputs from both Euroclusters will be the development of a series of activities to build up resilience such as market reports, thematic webinars and interactive workshops with AEI Tèxtils members for developing skills.

Over the kickoff meetings, the project partners had the opportunity to introduce their organizations and their role in the project, discuss the outcomes and timeline and plan the next actions for the upcoming months.

In the next 3 years, AEI Tèxtils will use these projects to strengthen its portfolio of strategic services to support resilience in the Catalan advanced textile materials sectors, as well as build strategic alliances at both regional and at European level.

Both projects are fully aligned with all axis of the cluster new strategy, addressing all four pillars: innovation, skills, internationalization and business development as well as the transversal axes on digitalization and sustainability thanks to the wide variety of activities that will deploy.

AEI Tèxtils considers these projects as a cornerstone for building resilience in the sector and the expansion of its innovation capacity. Clusters act as a hub and as a collaborative environment to facilitate partnership between enterprises, research institutes, policy makers and other institutions that promote innovation and provide SMEs access to new knowledge competencies, resources and markets.

xBUILD-EU and EuroBoosTEXare part of the 6 strategic projects that have been approved in the cluster during this year to support the competitiveness of its members, after the launching of ADDTEX and Hi-Tech-TEX. Other projects under grant agreement processing will be presented in the coming months.