SmartX Final Video

SHARED VISION

A very promising future

According to various studies the market for smart textiles and wearables is expected to enter an exponential growth phase with estimates ranging from an expected total world market of nearly 1.5 bn US$ by 2021) to almost 3 bn US$ for the European market alone in 2024. (see full article and sources in Resources).The majority of the applications are concentrated in 4 main fields: Protection & Defence, Sports & Fitness, Industrial and Technical Applications (transportation, architecture) and Medical & Healthcare. These markets show a particularly  great  potential  for SMEs to offer customised and niche market solutions with interesting cross-sectoral value chain impact  and transfer potential across a broader range of specific  applications,  providing  scale-up  opportunities. These new value chains represent a market opportunity of €5.5 billion in 2026. However, in order to realize its full potential for the industry one key issue to solve is to fill the industrial manufacturing capacity gap that exists to meet end market demand for smart textile-based solutions.

How to meet this challenge?

SmartX unites eight clusters two Research and Technology Organisations (for specific technological assistance) and three innovation support entities (for professional project initiation, implementation and follow-up): together they reach out to over 60,000 SMEs all over Europe to build a dedicated community around SmartX.
This extremely large action range helps SmartX boost smart textiles innovation and develop an end-to-end smart textiles manufacturing value chain in Europe, in order to drive promising prototypes faster to market.
Building a strong sustainable community is the underlying long-term objective of the Programme, to foster interaction and collaboration within the European smart textile industry. A series of focused workshops have taken place throughout the EU and allow professionals to gain and share advanced knowledge and state-of-the-art technological solutions.
During the 3-year programme, three calls for funding have been organised to help support up to 40 projects with a total budget of €2.4 million.

A limited number of high-potential innovation projects


The SmartX partners believe in a rigorous selection of a limited number of high-potential innovation projects tackling well-identified bottlenecks in the emerging smart textiles value chain. The involved SMEs are provided with a clear value chain framework and a customised multidisciplinary coaching approach.

Beyond that, we believe that providing the SMEs with a meaningful direct lump-sum funding amount which can be spent as they need to, on their most critical innovation requirements, provided by whatever knowledge and service provider, gives sufficient motivation and flexibility to attract the most ambitious and quirky SMEs and start-ups in this fast evolving market.

Credit Anna Sigge

Credit Anna Sigge

Credit Anna Sigge

PROGRAMME

SmartX aims to boost smart textiles innovation to develop an end-to-end smart textiles manufacturing value chain in Europe and help drive promising prototypes faster to market.

Building a strong sustainable community is the underlying long-term objective of the Programme, to foster interaction and collaboration within the European smart textile industry. A series of focused workshops have taken place throughout the EU and allow professionals to gain and share advanced knowledge and state-of-the-art technological solutions.

During the 3-year programme, three calls for funding were organised to support 25 individual projects with a total budget of €2.4 million.

A WEB-BASED COLLABORATION PLATFORM

In addition to the funding and coaching of innovation projects, SmartX has developed a web-based collaboration platform for European smart textiles businesses and experts with a number of self-service and interactive tools.

REGIONAL WORKSHOPS

Since the autumn of 2019, SmartX has organised regional workshops in Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Spain and Sweden and an IoT hackathon in Berlin to share knowledge and prepare companies for the upcoming calls for projects. More events, including webinars, are planned for the coming months.

CALLS FOR PROJECTS

Three open calls were held between November 2019 and February 2021. The SmartX project will continue until April 2022 and hopes to establish a blueprint for effective small-scale innovation funding at European level, using EU programmes such as HORIZON 2020.

THE TEAM

SmartX aims to boost smart textiles innovation to develop an end-to-end smart textiles manufacturing value chain in Europe and help drive promising prototypes faster to market.

Building a strong sustainable community is the underlying long term objective of the Programme, to foster interaction and collaboration within the European smart textile industry. A series of focused workshops has taken place place throughout the EU and allows professionals to gain and share advanced knowledge and state-of-the-art technological solutions.

During the 3-year programme, three calls for funding were organised to support 25 individual projects with a total budget of €2.4 million.

SmartX is an acceleration platform for innovative and smart textile projects, driven by a cluster of thirteen European partners from the textile and tech industries, focused on manufacturing technology, microelectronics, data processing, and IoT.

The thirteen European partners are the following: Textile ETP (Belgium), Euramaterials (France), Citta Studi Spa (Italy), Högskolan I Boras (Sweden), TEXFOR (Spain), CITEVE (Portugal), DSP Valley (Belgium), CITC EuraRFID (France), Deutsche Institute Fur Textile (Germany), CENTEXBEL (Belgium), Steinbeis Innovation (Germany), Institut Français de la Mode (France), Sourcebook (Germany).