FASCINATE OPENING CONFERENCE & NEW VALUE CHAIN WORKSHOP - RESULTS

Submitted by Chris Moscardi on 23 March 2021

FASCINATE - Conference & New Value Chain Workshop_0

Last Tuesday 16th March, the FASCINATE consortium celebrated its Opening Conference, which counted with a video presentation by Project Officer Valentino Izzo, who presented not only the strategy and goals of the COSME EU Programme and its different calls but also the importance of projects like FASCINATE, which aims to develop a strategy for te internationalization of EU SMEs from the Textile and Fashion sector working or incorporating sustainable and circular economy principles within their value chains. During the conference project coordinator MODACC presented an overview of the FASCINATE - ESCP- 4i partnership and partner Cluster Textil from Portugal shared the first results obtained so far, which shown the first SWOT exercise to identify challenges and opportunities for the EU Textile and Fashion Industry. The conference was enhanced with the participation of a fantastic speaker, Mr. Giovanni Luigi Bordone, brand ambassador and fashion expert, who share his vision and experience of the industry with a talk entitled "Sustainability and circular economy as drives for internationalization", explaining how Sustainability and Circular Economy steer the trends that allows facing the current industry challenges but also define new ways of operating on an International market in a more responsible ways. 

"A new era for EU fashion brands - Embracing digitalization & sustainability”, a New Value Chains Workshop

In addition to the conference Fascinate organized an important develop project exercise, which was a participatory collaborative hands-on workshop which gathered Industry experts, SMEs and project partners. The goal of the workshop, which was moderated by consultancy experts HYPE-EsadeCreapolis, started with inspirational talks by (Click in the title for the presentation):

After these inspiring talks which generated questions and further debate, HYPE conducted the new value chain workshop, a working session with a committed participation from attendees, around market analysis exercises, opportunities identification and innovative proposals which included digital solutions with the objective of identifying new value chains, that could address the problems and needs of the textile and fashion industry, using digital technologies as key enablers, and with special focus on sustainability and circular economy. The final objective is to promote the internationalization of the industry leveraging on the new value chains identified. These results will allow the partnership to build on the Internationalization Strategy together with the definition of potential target countries for internationalization opportunities. 

A full video for the session can be accessed here.

Additionally we have launched a survey for all those participants not able to stay during the Workshop (The survey will be open until Thursday 29th April, 2021). You can participate by clicking here: https://forms.gle/ophtCQ3iWG7P3kDy7

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