FIRE.Digital: Digital Research Platform for Collaborative Fashion Innovation

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Micro, small and medium designer fashion and textile businesses act as an engine for the wider UK fashion and textilesector, driving much of the creative conceptualization for the mass-market sector. However, lack of time and resources inthe resource- and time-poor fashion and textile sector has inhibited R&D culture in fashion SMEs, weakening the UKsector's ability to innovate and capitalize on invention, and retain competitive edge internationally. Increasing pressuressuch as natural resource depletion, escalating consumption and waste, competition from overseas, and financialfluctuations driven by the seasonal nature of designer fashion all strongly indicate that the current fashion business modelis unsustainable from both ecological and economic perspectives.Collaborative research and development between fashion designers and university researchers has great potential inaddressing these issues, however this space is currently in its infancy.Micro enterprises and SMEs have a poor understanding of university research, its potential benefits and available fundingopportunities. These businesses cannot allocate resource toward R&D beyond the inventive approaches applied butseldom capitalized upon in designer fashion. University researchers often work in isolation from the sector, use a differentlanguage and time frames that are not always compatible with industry needs and expectations.FIRE.Digital addresses these issues by developing the first digital platform for research-focused UK network of fashionSMEs and researchers. The key aim of the Platform is to galvanize collaborative research and innovation and providesustainable source of data on UK fashion SMEs and research network.Building on the existing London-focused FIREup digital prototype (www.fireup.org.uk), FIRE.Digital will develop into a highendonline tool for a UK-wide network of fashion industry and researchers to connect via user-friendly online network, aswell as access curated fashion and textile research content, including news and funding opportunities.FIRE.Digital will develop existing standard backend tools to create bespoke digital data collation and visualization tools andmethodologies, enabling capture of quantitative and qualitative data from the registered users. This data will providesignificant insights into the structure of fashion SMEs, positioning of fashion and textile researchers, UK Fashion networkformations, digital behavior in fashion SME's and researchers, barriers to collaborative research and open innovation in theUK fashion industry and lead towards establishing new research topics. These tools could potentially find application inwider creative industry research context.FIRE.Digital strategic and technical elements will be developed in collaboration with a Digital Agency. FIRE Focus Group,consisting of designer fashion and textile SMEs and researchers, will be utilized for analysis, development and testing ofthe platform.UAL researchers will focus on defining fashion ontology and typology, which will underpin the site functionalities, as well asact as a benchmark for classification of UK fashion and textile sector for digital purposes.A comprehensive database of UK fashion researchers and fashion/textile relevant higher education institutions will becollated in order to populate the platform and provide an accessible knowledge database of potential academic partners forcollaborative research.The collation and classification of potential sources of fashion research news and information will provide a basis for asustainable stream of fashion and textile research, and act as a reference resource for both fashion SMEs and researchersincluding development of new editorial content featuring groundbreaking people and research themes.