AEI Tèxtils, the Catalan cluster of Advanced Textile Materials, was last week in Ireland to review the progress and next steps for the xBUILD-EU Eurocluster project. xBUILD-EU – Cross-fertilization of industrial ecosystems in textile manufacturing and construction leveraging digital and advanced technologies to build up green and digital resilience in Europe – is one of the 30 flagship Euroclusters funded by the European Commission and coordinated by AEI Tèxtils.
In April, xBUILD-EU will launch its first call for proposals aimed at supporting SMEs in three key areas: innovation, acceleration of the green and digital transitions, and to support internationalization. The full details of the call, which will be jointly launch with EuroBoosTEX eurocluster call, will be presented on an open info-day on April 12th.
As part of the open call support activities, xBUILD-EU partners will organize a series of 5 bi-weekly webinars on Wednesdays, from March 29th onwards, with focus on digital solutions for textile and construction industry, green technologies and collaboration synergies facilitation.
In addition, AEI Tèxtils is also working on the development of a more resilient textile ecosystem through publication of dedicated reports developed for xBUILD-EU and EuroBoosTex projects.
During the stay in Ireland, cluster staff members participated in a team cluster capacity building activity to develop collaborative tools and workshops to support the resilience of the industrial ecosystems.
The training was facilitated by Christian Rangen, from Strategy Tools, who is a world-class trainer and coach for cluster development. For this training, both Euroclusters participated jointly to maximize the envisioned impact.
Euroclusters act as an ecosystem hub and as a collaborative environment to facilitate cluster collaboration, boosting opportunities for members of the cluster to bloom collaborations between enterprises, research institutes, policy makers and other institutions that promote innovation and provide SMEs access to new knowledge competencies, resources and markets.
