The textile and fashion industry is one of the world's biggest climate villains. Now the industry must change. In light of this, the initiative NEST - New Entrepreneurship for a Sustainable Textile industry was created. In spring 2022, NEST will offer a free acceleration process that, like a catapult, will help startups to lift their innovative ideas to solve the problems facing the industry.
The textile and fashion industry's very high environmental impact is linked to a linear and undigitised value chain. Changing this requires innovation and rethinking in every part of the chain, from idea through business development to business. Now NEST is here for Sweden as a nation to take the lead in transforming an industry that has been of great importance to us in the past - and can now be again.
NEST was created by four incubators
Borås INK, eXpression Umeå, Sting and Xplot are behind the national initiative, which is supported by Vinnova, the Swedish Innovation Agency, the TEKO industry association, the Borås School of Textiles and the business community. The aim is to combine the incubators' specialist areas, from textiles to tech, and geographical spread from Umeå in the north to Lund in the south, to jointly identify and develop growth companies with new solutions that can contribute to the transformation needed by industry.
"We need innovation and new companies that do things differently from what we have done before. You can think about new business models, or moving away from the traditional treatments in the wet processes, purely technical challenges that can perhaps be solved with new production techniques, robotisation and AI. But maybe also doing the customer experience in a different way. We may not own all our products in the future without the customer feeling that they are giving something up. I think few feel that it was degraded with the streaming service versus a DVD that they owned before. It could be a solution for our industry as well," says Cecilia Tall, Secretary General of TEKO - Sweden's Textile and Fashion Companies.
NEST gives participating entrepreneurs access to a cross-sector network and niche expertise. It's a free, intensive programme that hopes to catapult participants to launch and commercialise their product or service faster and at lower risk.
Application is open
Applications for the programme opened on 7 February. Entrepreneurs accepted to NEST receive business development and participate in boot camps hosted by industry experts and researchers. The programme concludes with a pitch event where the winners can move on to an incubation process with continued support from all incubators, the possibility of a verification grant of up to €300,000 and the chance to win a scholarship from TEKO.
