Digital Technologies as Catalysts for Systemic Innovation

While digital technologies are reshaping the fashion and textile world, they are also transforming design, production and usage along with many new technologies.

Can digital technologies be the key to systemic innovations that are often overlooked in the industry? While new developments coming with artificial intelligence create new potentials, can the fact that they are not yet mature in terms of ethics cause problems in their use?

To understand rapid change in detail can be understand by examining the reports, Euratex latest report declare that nearly half of the companies invested 1%-5% of their turnover in digital technologies and 44% invested less than 1%. Over 60% of companies plan to adopt digital technologies in the coming year with a priority on artificial intelligence followed by cybersecurity and big data.

According to McKinsey's estimates, generative AI has the potential to boost operating profits in the apparel, fashion, and luxury sectors by $150 billion to $275 billion within the next three to five years. Categorisation of the digital tech in  use in fashion and textile industry is at below.

In sustainability point of view, Eco Innovation Observatory report defines that digitalisation can help to minimise waste, enable more efficient processes in companies, promote longer product life cycles and reduce transaction costs through significantly improved information. Additionally it declares that digitalisation is the key driver of innovation processes for production and consumption systems all over Europe.