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WORTH Partnership Project
News article22 February 2018European Innovation Council and SMEs Executive Agency

Industry Expert Discussions - WORTH Weekend Madrid

Industry Expert Discussions – WORTH Weekend Madrid

The first call of WORTH Project has now closed and 26 partnerships have been selected; each to receive funding of up to 10,000 euro, a tailor-made coaching programme, product market positioning, and participation in two international trade fairs. However what sets the WORTH Project apart from other initiatives is the committed support from the WORTH Steering Board and the Mentors throughout the project’s development – providing advice and coaching to realise the partnerships ideas.

The WORTH Steering Board are not only experts in their field and experienced in their industries but interested in the growth that cross-border and cross-sector innovations through WORTH can bring to European creativity.

At WORTH Weekend Madrid the Steering Board took to the stage for a roundtable of hot-topic discussions surrounding the industry, moderated by Simona and Diego, who welcomed questions from the audience of WORTH Project finalists throughout.

Here’s a rundown of the insightful perspectives reached:

Julia Körner
Julia Körner

DEBATE ON DISRUPTIVE MANUFACTURING PROCESSES

The best approach to transform the fashion industry is not solely through the incorporation of technologies into the manufacturing and design processes.

Differentiation lies on the combination of the technology along with effective methods to successfully implement the required changes throughout the product transformation stages.

Even, if designers are using technology, it is also an opportunity to develop crafting.

Crafting involves creativity through innovative methods. Implementation of effective, disruptive and own methods and techniques is the key to produce something unique. 

DISRUPTIVE TECHNOLOGIES + OWN METHODS AND TECHNIQUES = CRAFTING THE FUTURE

Thomas Gnahm
Thomas Gnahm

NETWORKING AND SKILLS: INNOVATION DRIVERS

The designer must be creative enough to bring a conceived idea into a prototype.

Development of wearables is demanding networking and partnership opportunities. A successful and functional product cannot be developed and brought to market individually.

Talent is a must, but at the same time it must be backed up with methodologies, studies, expertise and complemented with technology.

Manufacturers and fashion designers should also create new formal channels of learning exchanges and knowledge transfer.

Kolbrun Yr Gunnarsdottir
Kolbrun Yr Gunnarsdottir

FASHION MEETS ENGINEERING

A rigorous limit between designers and engineers must be established. Designers have the expertise in the fashion field, and on the other hand, engineers (and architects), even though they do not study fashion, their scientific knowledge and mindset add huge value to the fashion design concepts and their collaborations should be supported.

Nowadays, fashion is on the road of complementariness between designers and technological engineers. Technology can help to promote and increase the popularity of the fashion design-based products.

Leslie Holden
Leslie Holden

EDUCATIONAL CHALLENGES

Transformation of the fashion industry must not only be addressed from the industrialized world’s perspective as this would become a privileged approach to address such global challenges but must also not lose sight of the fact that most of the garments mass production are allocated in developing countries with still poor-quality education systems.

Even though the technology and its applications in the fashion industry have enormously evolved over the last years, teaching and learning systems and methods have remained unchanged or barely evolved. Thus, there is a huge gap between the tech evolution and the ways to learn and teach such technological advancements. We need more modern and business-oriented educational systems.

Manuela Naveau
Manuela Naveau

CREATIVITY

Creativity is needed to properly share knowledge.
Technology can help in ways designers did not imagine until now.
Taking as example the 3D prototyping, it can be observed that it helps in producing designs and shapes that the human mind did not realise can be done without pencils.

Nowadays, garments made with passion are becoming scarce and it’s important to bring them back to the popularity level that they had before. The problem is that today consumerism is widely promoted instead of high-quality products.

Konstantyn Kofta
Konstantyn Kofta

TALENT AND COLLABORATIONS

The most important for nowadays fashion is the reorientation of new designers to the mix of knowledge in various fields.

An important aspect is the cultivation and continuous exercise of this talent, through different methodologies.

Collaboration between different people, even with the same educational background, can generate the design by default, which involves the action of designing by the ideas of someone else and produce something different, and even better than the original idea.

Pavel Ivancic
Pavel Ivancic

PROMOTING TOGETHERNESS AND SUSTAINABIILITY

Nowadays consumers are not ready for these new, technological products, but sustainability is a must, and the demand for such projects is at its very beginning. For this reason, feedback from customers must be taken into consideration, as innovation is a risk-taking approach.

It must be considered as a good example the organic food business approach, which states that it is important what we put on the body, not how many garments we have to raise awareness of the quality of textiles.

Wolfgang Mildner
Wolfgang Mildner

FUTURE TRENDS

Consumers are not fully committed to embracing a sustainable fashion culture because the industries are not actually reacting to the market demands.

A sustainable culture is not built on the way the market trends are dictated by the industry, but from the market needs, concerns, demands and trends to be interpreted by the industry. Feedback should come from the consumers and not the other way.

Stretchable components will lead the trend on wearables market by 2025. Flexible electronics with high-resistance to the wearer cares and uses along with the 3R actions of such materials are the huge challenge.

Sources

Details

Publication date
22 February 2018
Author
European Innovation Council and SMEs Executive Agency
News Type
Inspire