Cluster paper in the boosting innovation field is not relevant but determinant. Clusters advice companies in their way to find out and exploit their capabilities, their strategic direction, and improve their weaknesses. Nowadays, these objectives are directly in line with the transformation of the sector, with the update of the textile industry from the XX century to the XXI century. Specifically, this improvement is about two key innovation pillars (among others) sustainability and digitalisation.
Clusters also approach these aims by actuating as an optimal ecosystem for companies’ interaction, facilitating symbiosis, exchange of experiences and confidence among them.
Some examples of these kinds of facilitating activities are the company collaboration or the simple participation -each one by their own- in several programs for the development of new products or the improvement of their companies and factories.
Also, some funding programs are targeted to several companies to find out a way to introduce to an existing product a smart application or directly to design a new product that comes from companies’ ideas.
In many cases, the result of these initiatives led by clusters end up producing new products and new applications that involve sensors, actuators and many other innovation forms to the market.
This paper attempts to explain the particular experience of the Catalan Cluster of Advance Textile Materials, AEI Tèxtils, and their companies’ innovation initiatives as an example to illustrate how a cluster boosts innovation and how it and its companies act as a facilitating ecosystem for co-design and co-develop innovation in the sector.