First Call Winners Selected

February 28, 2018 – The first selection of the WORTH Partnership Project is complete. The WORTH Weekend Madrid (Feb 3-4, 2018) saw more than 150 talented creative and design professionals and SMEs come together from across Europe, all with the same belief that innovation can drive a significant change to the EU industry, society, and communities. The attendees joined together for the weekend of final evaluations to bring forth their project ideas.

In one of the most charming European cities, Madrid, and in the beautiful IED Master as the setting, the cohesive two-day event encouraged the participants to communicate, brainstorm, build relationships, share, and reinforce the WORTH values: connect, create and innovate on a transnational basis across Europe.

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The first day of the event saw the partners pitch their innovative ideas in a back-to-back presentation, involving all 41 of the finalists. The audience was formed of their peers, the European Commission, the WORTH mentors, the WORTH Team, and the highly renowned expert Steering Board [ZM1] [EG2] panel from the high-end fashion, design, and consumer goods industries. The steering board ended the day with an insightful round table of debates, receiving questions from the finalists and ending on the note of “promoting togetherness” – Pavel Ivancic.

The enriching weekend continued onto the second day, when each partner met with their related Steering Board member and mentor to discuss their projects in-depth, defining the project goals and support WORTH Project can provide.

Parallel to the focus meetings, lectures on “Sustainability in the Textile Sector” (by Simona Moldovan, AITEX), “Intellectual Property Rights” (by Annamaria Stein from the AA Franzosi law firm, Italy), “Design Thinking” (by Christina Skoubridou from KEPA Cultural Development Center of Greece) and “Fashion as an interface to the digital dimension” ( by the renowned FashTech Designer Jasna Rokegem from Belgium) took place under the stunning stained glass roof of the IED Master building.

A conclusion was reached at the end of the weekend for which final projects will be granted WORTH support amongst the 41 shortlisted partnerships. The results were a diverse selection of 27 extremely promising transnational partnership projects, involving 60 designers, starts-ups, and companies, representing 20 EU COSME countries across the different creative industry sectors: 16 working in fashion and textile, 2 in footwear, 3 in accessories, 3 in furniture, 2 in jewelry, and 1 in leather.

“There was a high level of individual commitment from the participating partnerships and from the steering board who selected the projects to respond to the expectations created by these - stated Piedad Rivas, program manager, ‎European Commission - The level of expectations from participants was high and the return received in terms of connection and learning exchange was exponential”.

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