Techtextil India is India’s leading trade fair for technical textiles and nonwovens. © Messe Frankfurt / Techtextil India edition

With an aim to identify solutions to the critical challenges of sustainable urban living, Messe Frankfurt India will host India’s first Technical Textile Hackathon on 22 November 2019. The hackathon titled Techtextil NEXT will build an eco-system that supports India’s technical textile start-ups and enables them to develop products and prototypes with technical textiles, driving innovations in the industry.

Representing the supply-chain of fibre to innovation and start-ups to investor stage with, India’s first Technical Textile Hackathon aims to potentially build business models that can be funded, scaled, and taken global. The hackathon is expected to bring India’s top 10 technical textile start-ups under one roof. While the manufacturing side will be represented by companies of speciality fibres, yarns, textiles, fabrics, products along with brands and traders, the entrepreneur side will cover SME's, start-up ecosystems and accelerators.

Organised in association with Ideas that Scale as the knowledge partner,  the intense three-hour solution-driven session at the Techtextil NEXT Hackathon will take up topics centred around India’s challenges of sustainability such as ocean littering, plastic recycling and waste disposal and drive concepts for start-ups to collaborate with industry stakeholders to develop focused solutions using “technical textiles”.

Techtextil India is India’s leading trade fair for technical textiles and nonwovens covering the value chain of technical textiles and its 12 application areas of Agrotech, Buildtech, Clothtech, Geotech, Hometech, Indutech, Medtech, Mobiltech, Oekotech, Packtech, Protech, and Sporttech. 

Techtextil India covers the value chain of technical textiles and its 12 application areas. © Messe Frankfurt / Techtextil India edition

The seventh edition of the event already has a strong line-up of participation from 185 companies from 12 countries including Austria, Belgium, China, France, Germany, Italy, Korea, the Netherlands, Saudi Arabia, Spain, and China/Taiwan. Some of the industry’s key players, such as Aditya Birla Yarns (P T Elegant), Archroma, Coated Sales, Ginni Filaments, Lenzing Ag India, Montex Glass Fiber, Reliance Industries Lts, and Saint Gobain among others, will have their latest technical textile innovations spread across the exhibition space covering these application areas. 

With textile stakeholders and key decision makers on the floor, the concurrent Hackathon can enable stakeholders to engage in a sustained dialogue and drive innovations in India’s technical textiles industry. The organisers believe the collaborations can potentially lead to the development of prototypes, Pilot projects, new technical textile product development, and GoTo Market strategies.

“While Techtextil India exhibition highlights innovations in the sector, the Techtextil NEXT Hackathon is a concerted effort to tackle today’s urban living challenges with next-generation solutions. The platform has the potential to present transformative ideas,” said Raj Manek, Executive Director and Board Member, Messe Frankfurt Asia Holdings.

www.techtextil-india.in.messefrankfurt.com