Fashion-Tech Alliance: Innovating professional digital competences and skills in the Fashion Industry

In the last decades, the traditional Fashion sector has been suffering from an increasing complexity due to turbulence and saturation of global markets and to the difficulty of identifying solid consumption behaviors’ patterns because of consumers’ multifaceted approach to fashion. In this context, within the framework of a digital transformation that is re-defining the very meanings of production, distribution and services, and consumption, digital technologies have been representing the opportunity to support the competitiveness of the European fashion industry and in particular of the Fashion-tech sector, at the crossing of fashion, textile, electronics, and the digital paradigm. The raise of Fashion-Tech has nurtured design processes and tools to enable, reactivate and reconfigure relations and processes in research, production, logistics, and retailing of the traditional fashion supply chain. These new opportunities are pushing fashion companies and entrepreneurs to embrace the challenge of integrating digital technologies to innovate their business models, products and services, and processes, to avoid continuing suffering loss of growth and the risks of becoming less competitive and less relevant in a global marketplace. Therefore, the need for updated digital competencies and know-how to answer this ongoing quest for innovation has filled the agenda of stakeholders involved in Higher Education, Professional Education, and Continuing Education, such as universities, Human Resources departments of fashion companies, and local and transnational policy makers. Partnerships between higher education institutions, fashion enterprises, and their socio-economic supply chain can allow to review and fine-tune the design of Fashion-Tech curricula to ensure they are in dialogue with fashion and technology companies. The paper draws on ongoing research carried out through "FTalliance. Weaving Universities and Companies to Co-create Fashion-Tech Future Talents", an Erasmus+ KA2 Project co-founded by the Erasmus+ Programme of the European Union (2020-2022) which focuses on a 3-year academia-industries partnership aimed to facilitate the exchange, flow of knowledge and co-creation within the Fashion-Tech sector to boost students’ employability and innovation potential. The paper will describe the preliminary results deriving from action-based research delivered through 3 digital focus groups hosted by HEIs and partner companies to evaluate the Fashion-Tech curriculum and to explore the current competences gap in the fashion industry and education. The Fashion-Tech Curriculum was mapped and validated amongst the results of the Focus Groups identify and address academic gaps, needless repetitions, redundancies, and misalignments for the purpose of improving its overall coherence and, by extension, to align the educational model (learning standards, teaching, contents, assessments, assignments, lessons, and instructional techniques) toward the curriculum effectiveness to be tested further through 3 pilot learning experiences.