Fashion and textile-focused Creative Hubs represent dynamic ecosystems where design, manufacturing, research, and retail converge. These hubs support professionals ranging from independent designers and researchers to small business owners and educators, promoting regenerative and value-creating innovation.

This pilot addresses sector-specific needs by fostering competencies that drive ethical innovation, sustainability, and system change in fashion and textiles.

Target group:
Sector practitioners from the ECHN Fashion & textile cluster and beyond: designers, small creative businesses, educators, researchers, suppliers and innovation coordinators.

Competencies:
Anticipatory Innovation
Value-Creating Agency
Narrative Design
Regenerative Agency
Boundary-Spanning

General approach:
Adaptive, practice-based, and sector-specific; focused on real challenges, co-creation, and translating insights
into practical, immediately usable tools.

Through hands-on tools, prototyping, partnership- building exercises, and follow-up work that allows participants to integrate sustainability approaches directly into their fashion practices and organisational workflows.

Pilot timeline:

Month 1 (December 2025):

Workshop 1 — Designing Solutions & New Narratives

Month 1–2:
Internal hub work (Idea-to-Value Canvas & Narrative assignment)

Month 2:
Workshop 2 — Prototyping, partnerships, regenerative strategies

Month 3: Consolidation, quality assurance, reporting, dissemination

Potential impact of the Pilot:

Innovation: Practical framework that help fashion practitioners design circular solutions that influence customer behaviours and everyday choices.

Learning: Strengthen skills in sustainability storytelling and narrative design, enabling clearer communication of circular practices to customers, clients, and stakeholders.

Network: Build new partnerships across designers, suppliers, and hubs to support shared behavior-change initiatives in the sector.

Societal: Contribute to a shift in consumer understanding through better narratives, accessible sustainability communication, and visible examples of regenerative fashion practices.

Other: Support the creation of customer-facing actions, services, and products that not only reflect sustainable principles but actively drive behavioral and systemic change across the fashion ecosystem.

The pilot can be extended into specialised spin-offs on circular design methods, sustainable materials, business model innovation, or multi-hub collaboration.