FTalliance. Weaving Universities and Companies to Co-create FashionTech Future Talents

The purpose of the project is to ensure the ongoing innovation in the European Fashion-Tech sector by providing emerging talent with relevant competencies and know-how to enter the jobs market. We will do this through building strong and committed partnerships between higher education institutions, fashion enterprises and their socio-economic supply chain.

Start date: 2020-01-01

End date: 2022-12-31

Fashion-Tech means new products, processes, tools and professional figures that come about as result of cross-disciplinary approaches. To keep up with this emerging field, there is an increasing urgency for organizations - university and companies - to adapt and advance collaborative practices, in order to find ways to integrate new technologies into fashion and design in order to boost competitiveness.

Expected results and effects

The expected results of the project are as follows:

Develop multidisciplinary curricula integrating design and engineering to develop savvy professional that can drive the Fashion-Tech sector growth.
Understanding the evolving and emerging needs of Fashion-Tech employers and sourcing creative and disruptive talents to strengthen employability, creativity and new professional paths.
Opening up new learning opportunities through the practical application of technical and entrepreneurial skills which are fully embedded in the curriculum.

Planned approach and implementation

The strategy adopted for organizing FTAlliance will include both theoretical pedagogic research and a practical co-creation and experimental approach. FTAlliance is structured into 7 work packages that deal with:

Knowledge exchange between academics and professionals in order to manage the design processes, through focus groups and visits to partner companies in order to generate a fashion-tech role portfolio,
Designing and Piloting the Learning Experience in order to co-create educational experiences in the field of Fashion-Tech,
Fashion-Tech Residency in order to select and develop student projects in collaboration with companies, specific to fashion-tech product/service prototypes,
Quality Evaluation in order to assess the quality, the impact and the efficiency of the knowledge exchange activities, including the learning outcomes of the project-based modules, of the challenges based workshops and of the Fashion-Tech Residency,
Developing Dissemination, Exploitation & Sustainability Plans.