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 November 22, 2019, on the last day of Techtextil India 2019. The hackathon titled 'Techtextil Next' aims to potentially build business models that can be funded, scaled, and taken global.

The hackathon 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 & start-ups to investor stage, 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 3-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'.

"Technical textile is increasingly penetrating every aspect of our daily lives such as medical masks, car seats, trekking gears, specialised sportswear, etc without most of us noticing. What we don’t realise is that we are surrounded by textiles like nonwoven fabric in every single way. The future with smart wearable textiles is also near," Messe Frankfurt India said in a press release.

With textile stakeholders and key decisionmakers 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 go to 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 Ltd.

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, Sporttech.  The 7th edition of this business 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 Ltd, Saint Gobain among others will have their latest technical textile innovations spread across the exhibition space covering these application areas.