The TCBL project kicked off last month – What’s it all about?
 
Textile & Clothing Business Labs (TCBL) aims to create a transformational ecosystem capable of constantly innovating with the business and process models of the European Textile and Clothing (T&C) industry. The latter sector shows the greatest dependence on price based competition (a race to the bottom, globally) and at the same time the greatest promise of potential impact of new trends such as mass customisation, home production, etc. on business and process models.
 
Principal Investigator, Fridolin Wild and his collaborators will be facing the challenge of exploiting and governing these trends to strongly re-direct EU’s T&C sector away from competing on price towards competing on knowledge, to reach economic, environmental, and social sustainability. To approach this on a global scale, the project aims to act on knowledge transforming processes as elements of an emergent business ecosystem that includes more agile, cheaper, more reliable supply chains, which during this project will become increasingly customer-driven (from B2B supply chains, to C2B supply chains and variants on them such as ad hoc bulk purchasing, C+C).
 
We will be carrying out research on equipment and materials as well as customer creativity and aspirations; experimenting on and integrating innovative processes into business systems; and developing complementary ICT services supporting the shift towards complex and distributed, but flexible and responsive value chains.

Pilot actions will also include proof-of-concept applications to sectors other than T&C, such as footwear or furniture, both to evaluate the transferability of the business model concepts and to explore potential new cross-sector business propositions. A core set of partners will “seed” pilot activities and extend them to external actors participating in the TCBL Associates Programme.