AEI TÈXTILS, the Catalan Technical Textiles’ Cluster, will be the first Catalan organization to ever coordinate a Horizon 2020 project funded under the highly competitive call “Cluster facilitated projects for new industrial value chains (INNOSUP-01)”. 

The project, GALACTICA - Smart Industrial innovation as enabler to drive new value chains for textiles and aerospace, will start on September 2020 and run until February 2023. 

GALACTICA aims to support the creation of new industrial value chains around textile and aerospace based on advanced manufacturing. The project will facilitate the uptake of Industrial intelligent systems and Industrial Internet of Things as part of the strategic innovation vectors for the textile and aerospace industries.

The project has a total budget of 5 M€ from which 4M€ are directly targeted to support SMEs to innovate with diverse mechanisms including 3M€ financial support through two open calls for proposals, hackathons and travel grants. The first call for proposals will be launched early in 2021.

During the project, AEI Tèxtils will also organize several missions with its members to visit aerospace and advanced manufacturing clusters with the aim of facilitating business opportunities and cross-sectoral innovation.

Besides AEI Tèxtils, the GALACTICA partnership integrates seven additional clusters and two innovation agents: ATEVAL in Valencia, CTA in Andalusia, NTT in Italy, CORALLIA in Greece, Suderelbe in Germany,  PRODUCTECH in Portugal, EMC2 in France, EBAN in Belgium and Science Park Graz in Austria.

AEI Tèxtils considers this project as a cornerstone for the long-term innovation capacity of the technical textiles’ sector. Clusters act as a hub and as a collaborative environment to facilitate partnership between enterprises, research institutes, policymakers and other institutions that promote innovation and provide SMEs access to new knowledge competencies, resources and markets. 

AEI TÈXTILS and its members’ testimonial: https://youtu.be/-C73fwr8GdE