TRANSITIONS is a strategic alliance for innovation formed by research and technological centres, VET, HE institutions, public policy actors, SMEs and other sectoral organizations from Spain, Italy, Netherland and Sweden to nurture the textile and fashion transition to a 4.0 system and a circular economy by developing new learning methods, tools and practices to help students, young designers and professionals, to face real challenges. Fashion and textiles (F&T) are the second most polluting industry in the world. The F&T sectors face structural and systemic challenges that require a profound model change. The project addresses the core of the value chain and the future of the new fashion system change. Stakeholders will work together to design and develop new training methods to face the digital and green transformation. The objective is to create a collaborative and real work-based training where the different actors in the value chain work on how to take advantage of technology to generate new value proposals and new business models within a circular economy.TRANSITIONS will:- Create a modular training programme based on Industry 4.0 for a T&F new circular system. - Set up innovation-focused training modules based on real practice and challenges (Transition Labs) to skill, reskill and upskill students and professionals - Developing new ways to generate innovation in textile and design processes, production and commercialization. Our target audience are Product, F&T design students, young designers; fashion startups; SMEs professionals from design and management of creative industries; teachers and researchers in F&T design. All the specialists in design and development training of the SMEs F&T sectors. Makers and territorial agents of change.Methodology: TRANSITION proposes a multidisciplinary pedagogical approach based on Transition design theories and emerging disciplines and practices at the intersection of textile, biology, digital fabrication.

SmartX will match smart textiles technology with end market demand by filling the current industrial manufacturing gap. To realise this, SmartX will establish a novel industrial value chain composed of SMEs and start-ups from textiles, design, (micro)electronics, data processing, IoT, manufacturing technology, distribution and end user sectors. The SmartX core activity is the funding a portfolio of Trailblazer innovation projects involving at least 40 SMEs, which will pioneer one or more stages of the novel smart textiles value chain. Independent external experts will select these small cross-sectorial, cross-cultural and cross-regional innovation actions that will be co-funded by SmartX via an open call system. The projects will be supported from start to end via the SmartX Coaching Approach covering all relevant multidisciplinary aspects and delivered by specially trained cluster managers. We will focus on protective wear, industrial applications and healthcare & wellbeing end markets. Trailblazer project formation will be supported by an open collaboration platform (target > 150 company members) that will support smart textiles value chain building. The platform will be maintained and extended beyond smartX. We will build on the successful WORTH project for implementing small funding schemes. We will apply the award-winning Innovation Potential Audit and will link with REGIOTEX, a thematic partnership of 15 regions under the S3 Platform on Industrial Modernisation to leverage follow up funding. SmartX unites 8 clusters (accessing over 60.000 SMEs across Europe), 2 RTOs (for technological assistance) and 3 innovation support entities. The wearables market is estimated at ca €150 billion (2026). Assuming smart textiles will take 10%, the new value chain targeted by SmartX represents in Europe ca €5.5 billion or ca 22.000 jobs. US and Asia are setting up significant public and private investments, so European action is needed not to miss this value and job creating opportunity.

Humans are at the center of knowledge-intensive manufacturing processes. They must be skilled and flexible to meet the requirements of their work environment. The training of new workers in these processes is time consuming and costly for companies. Industries, such as the Italian textile sector suffer from the shortage of skilled workers caused, e.g. by the demographic change. A second challenge for the manufacturing sector is the continuous competition through high quality products. COALA will address both challenges through the innovative design and development of a voice-first Digital Intelligent Assistant for the manufacturing sector. The COALA solution will base on the privacy-focused open assistant Mycroft. It integrates prescriptive quality analytics, AI system to support on-the-job training of new workers, and a novel explanation engine - the WHY engine. COALA will address AI ethics during design, deployment, and use of the new solution. Critical components for the adoption of the solution are a new didactic concept to reach workers about opportunities, challenges, and risks in human-AI collaboration, and a concurrent change management process. Three use cases (textile, white goods, liquid packaging) will evaluate the results in common manufacturing processes with significant economic relevance. COALA will contribute its results to the European AI community, e.g. via the AI4EU platform, and it will involve Digital Innovation Hubs to replicate its demonstrators for Europes first trustworthy digital assistant for the manufacturing industry. We expect to reduce the failure cost in manufacturing by 30-60% with the prescriptive quality analytics feature and the assisted worker training. For the change over time we expect a reduction of 15% to 30% by shortening the worker training time.

SEISMEC will demonstrate an empowered, human-centred and ethical development of digital and industrial technologies in 17 pilots in 19 companies from 14 countries across 14 industrial ecosystems. It will do so through a two-way engagement in the development of technologies, empowering end-users and workers, and supporting social innovation, in a process labelled the SEISMEC shift. It will contribute to increased inclusiveness, by supporting a human-centred approach to technology development that is aligned with European social and ethical values (including gender and intersectional aspects). The benefits of human centrism will be measured in Creativity, Collaboration, Autonomy, Automation, Productivity, Privacy, Safety and job Satisfaction, the CAPS empowerment factors for human-centrism. SEIMSECs two-way engagement introduces technical innovations such as explainability, co-development, feedback methods and interfaces to enhance human centrism, but also incorporates plans, needs and innovations from companies and their workers steering them towards an empowered human-centric Industry 5.0 path. The consortium brings together institutions at the forefront of engineering, computer science, networking and exploitation, coordinated by a world-leading social sciences and humanities university, and building up on groundbreaking European projects on industrial innovation. SEISMEC pilots are representative of all sectors and company sizes, and most European countries and worker roles. Every industrial enterprise in Europe will be able to see some aspect of their activity reflected in SEISMECs pilots and will be able to learn from the project’s outputs through an active campaign of cross-sector empowerment practices exchange. With a strong engagement of European, national and local stakeholders, SEISMEC is landmark effort in European industry’s shift to empowerment and human-centrism, one that puts the worker and European Values at the core of its global competitiveness