SmartX Europe aimed 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.

Following the conclusion of the SmartX Europe project, project partners realised that one of the most notable achievements of the project was the realisation that sharing and cross-sector collaboration can play a significant role in innovation. For this reason, Textile ETP launched the SmartX Innovation Hub to help e-textile and high-performance textile companies, research organisations and brands to learn, network and collaborate.

Discover the SmartX Innovation Hub

What was SmartX Europe?

Why Funding Smart Textiles Innovation? SmartX: a Unique Accelerator for a Cross-sectoral Innovation Challenge

We have been hearing about innovations in the smart textiles field over the past decade. Still, in recent years e-textiles and wearables have started to move out from research and prototyping stages, building a clear momentum of industry adoption across several promising end markets, which are expected to reach 1.5 billion by 2025 (source: Euratex).

SmartX wearables offer unprecedented opportunities for tackling pressing societal challenges by providing solutions in healthy ageing, patient monitoring, emergency management, safety at work, productivity enhancement, energy management of homes, and others. Several research studies have identified wearables as one of the ten technologies that will change our lives.

During the 3-year collaborative project, SmartX traveled around Europe looking for cross-sectoral partnerships from e-textiles innovators that could further the goal of establishing new integrated value chains for development, manufacturing, and marketing, thus filling the missing link

Finding the Best Smart Textiles Innovators in Europe

SmartX allocated €2.4 million during the three open calls, plus coaching activities. Projects that were eligible to participate in SmartX calls had to meet the following hard criteria: an existing prototype that contained a textile material with an integrated electronic device providing a smart function, have business potential, and technology ready to scale up into one of the three targeted end markets: protection, and sports; health and wellbeing; and industrial applications.

A total of 301 Expressions of Interest were received, out of which 105 turned into applications across the three open calls. 25 projects by 50 SMEs from 15 different EU countries were awarded. Each of these projects focused on a specific product and a related part of the value chain for Smart Textiles.

To discover the 25 funded projects, read the SmartX brochure.

Providing a Helping Hand Throughout the Entire Journey

One of the core activities of SmartX was to identify the needs and struggles of the awarded SMEs to reach the smart textiles market and coach them accordingly. Thanks to The Self-Assessment Tool (SAT), which is available via the SmartX community platform for all members and is a highly recommended instrument for detecting strengths and finding the right coach or development partner.

The 12 in-house coaches organised ten different coaching webinars to address the competencies most lacking in the awarded SMEs as per their SAT results. Some of the collective webinars were about recyclability, integration, standardisation, etc., aligning well with the gaps identified in the Value Chain Map. All SmartX coaches and experts have worked closely with the 105 SMEs that applied, and followed the 25 awarded projects throughout their project journey.

SmartX Europe Partners

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).