Last week, AEI Tèxtils, the Catalan Technical Textiles’ Cluster, started two new strategic projects for the cluster that will benefit its members, the manufacturing companies of the advanced textiles’ sector.

The project GALACTICA - Smart Industrial innovation as enabler to drive new value chains for textiles and aerospace, coordinated by the cluster, is funded by the Horizon 2020 program from the European Commission under the Innosup-01 call. It started with its kick off meeting held virtually on September 28^th and 29^th 2020.

GALACTICA aims to support the creation of new industrial value chains around textile and aerospace based on advanced manufacturing. The project will facilitate the uptake of Industrial Intelligent Systems and Industrial Internet of Things as part of the strategic innovation vectors for the textile and aerospace industries. The project will run until February 2023. 

The GALACTICA partnership integrates other seven European clusters and two innovation agents: ATEVAL in Valencia, CTA in Andalusia, NTT in Italy, CORALLIA in Greece, Suderelbe in Germany,  PRODUCTECH in Portugal, EMC2 in France, EBAN in Belgium and Science Park Graz in Austria.

The project has a total budget of 5 M€ from which 4M€ are directly targeted to support SMEs to innovate with diverse mechanisms including 3M€ financial support through two open calls for proposals, hackathons and travel grants. The first call for proposals will be launched in March 2021 and the second one on January 2022. 

The project will also organize a set of activities prior to each call for proposals to facilitate generation of project ideas such as workshops, matchmakings and online webinars. Due to the current situation, the first round of activities will be held mostly virtually.

The second strategic project is TEXGLOBAL - European Innovative Textiles Go International: Innovative Global Value Chain Creation And Textile Global Markets Exploration, which aims at supporting the growth, the competitiveness and industrial modernization of European Textile companies by facilitating internationalization and innovation activities. The project is funded by the COSME program of the European Commission under the Cluster Go International call and started with its kick off meeting held virtually on September 30^th.

The project partnership brings together NTT from Italy as project coordinator, AEI TÈXTILS, ATEVAL from Valencia Region, CITEVE from Portugal and TECHTERA from France.

Within TEXGLOBAL, the partnership will organize three business missions to international countries to explore joint opportunities for business development and innovation partnerships. The missions are planned to United States of America, Mexico and Vietnam during the second half of 2021 and first half of 2022.

In addition, the TEXGLOBAL partnership will organize a series of activities to support actions to facilitate textile SMEs in going international and the partners will participate in international trade fairs to provide visibility of the European textile sector.

Both GALACTICA and TEXGLOBAL projects are aligned with the CLAMTEX project led by AEI TÈXTILS, which started earlier this year on February 2020.

This third project completes the strategic framework of the cluster to support advanced textiles’ manufacturing companies in Catalonia. The three projects tackle the different strategic needs from the companies in the sector: innovation support (GALACTICA), internationalization (TEXGLOBAL) and strategy (CLAMTEX).

AEI Tèxtils aims to support the Catalan technical textiles’ sector to overcome the COVID-19 crisis gaining competitiveness in the process driven by innovation and collaboration within the sector.

AEI TÈXTILS and its members’ testimonial: https://youtu.be/-C73fwr8GdE