Associations

2024-02-29

Alliances for innovation - Addtex

Photo: The 4th meeting of ADDTEX partners took place at the end of January 2024 at the Impact Hub, Athens. Source: ADDTEX

On January 30 and 31, 2024, the ADDTEX project partners met in Athens to inform themselves about the results of the individual partners of the EU Erasmus+ project and to discuss further activities. After the meetings in Terrassa, Spain, Vila Nova de Famalicão, Portugal and Limerick, Ireland, the 4th transnational meeting took place in the heart of Athens at the invitation of the Greek Addtex partner Cre.Thi.Dev. As the largest textile trade association in Germany, IVGT e.V. is one of the 12 ADDTEX partners and was once again present in Athens.

Fourth transnational meeting in Athens

The meeting began with a presentation by partner IDEAM, Limerick, Ireland, on the activities and results of work package WP3. The most important news: the Smart, Digital and Green Skills Academy has been completed and will be launched at the beginning of March 2024. Free enrolment in the courses via the portal www.addtex.eu enables textile engineers and professionals, technicians, graduates as well as managers, mentors and trainers to keep up to date on the topics of innovative, future-proof materials, digitalization and sustainability in the textile industry. The interactive online courses, which are held in English, consist of different modules that build on each other and focus on the green, intelligent and digital transformation of the textile industry. The focus is on technical textiles as an important growth driver of the textile industry in the EU.

The meeting also focused on the HUBS and Hackathon activities, which will begin in spring, as well as the Summer School, which will take place in Prato, Italy, in the first week of July. Partner TITERA, Slovenia, based in Weimar, presented the program of the summer school, which will be aimed in particular at students from the four universities PIN (Italy/Florence), UB (Sweden), UPC (Spain) and TUS (Italy/Milan). The challenges posed to the students will be related to the green, smart and digital transition and will be solved. Lectures, group work, company visits and prototyping sessions will be the focus of the program.

The second day began with an overview of work package WP5. This will increasingly focus on cooperation between science and industry and the establishment of HUBS within clusters. In addition, hackathons are to be organized and carried out in which both students and companies will be involved. CITEVE, Portugal, presented an initial idea for this.

Another item on the program of the meeting was dedicated to the various cross-cutting activities of the project. Communication and dissemination was presented by CIAPE, Italy; the quality assessment of the project was presented by Cre.Thi.Dev., Greece and the management aspects were presented by AEI Textils, Spain. The AddTex project is progressing successfully and the program for the next months will be full of activities for both the project partners and the beneficiaries. For example, the IVGT in Germany is organizing a workshop on AI in the textile industry on 21 February 2024 in Frankfurt. Further workshops on the ADDTEX project topics will take place from March to May.

The IVGT will provide information about the AddTex Academy, which will offer free digital courses until 2025, at this year's Techtextil 2024, the leading international trade fair for technical textiles and nonwovens, which will take place in Frankfurt from April 23-26, 2024. You will find the IVGT joint stand at Techtextil 2024 in Hall 12.1 B45B.