ITMA 2023 making rounds of success and calls for industry collaboration

ITMA 2023 is addressing the need for greater and more diverse industry collaboration.

“ITMA continues to be a sought-after platform for textile machinery manufacturers, with this year’s exhibition showing a 3% increase in net exhibit space compared to ITMA 2019,” said Cematex president Ernesto Maurer. “Interestingly, we also welcomed new exhibitors from Tunisia, Estonia, Ireland, Norway, Ukraine, and as far  afield as Panama, Peru and Honduras.

Spanning 200,000 square metres of the Fiera Milano Rho venue, ITMA 2023 is the biggest textile machinery exhibition so far in the post-pandemic era. Being highlighted are solutions for advanced materials, automation and the digital future and sustainability and circularity under the show theme, Transforming the World of Textiles.

At ITMA, long-standing academic himself, Goswami opened the session by acknowledging the crucial role of research institutions in propelling our collective technical knowledge and capabilities. However, he said that while these works are valuable contributions to our industry’s progression, developments may miss the mark in terms of commercial alignment. Ultimately, opportunities for high-impact innovation are lost when the objectives and efforts of academia and industry are disconnected. Goswami conceptualized this with the common R&D metaphor of the “valley f death”- the perilous bridging phase between ideation and basic research and eventually applied commercialization.

“As part of our strategy to support the aspirations of local manufacturers in South Asia, South East and the Middle East to modernise their operations, we are augmenting the series with a second location in Asia to better reach out to the textile hubs in these regions,” said Ernesto Maurer. “ITMA ASIA was held in Singapore in 2001 and 2005 before it combined with CITME and we moved the exhibition to Shanghai to enable our members to take advantage of the buoyant textile sector in China after the country joined the World Trade Organisation in 2001. Some companies in major textile producing countries, however, have had difficulty in travelling to China in the past.”