About
Us
The Smart Textile Alliance is a specialist ecosystem for smart textile innovation. Founded with the explicit goal of harmonizing technology standards and increasing the maturity of the smart textiles supply chain, to accelerate time to market and reduce development costs for innovative products.
What we do
We facilitate access to expert state-of-the-art knowledge, proven components and technologies and provide opportunities to network with other members of the ecosystem. We promote smart textiles, showcasing facilities, capabilities and services of ecosystem members and offer opportunities to join relevant proposals with capable industrial and academic partners.
In the longer term, STA aims to develop voluntary, consensus-based standards for components and systems, and to provide a programme to validate and certify their quality and interoperability.
Our
Team
Smart Textile Alliance is a not-for-profit corporation founded in October 2020. We are registered in England and work out of London, UK and Aarhus, Denmark
Mili Tharakan
Mili is an experienced entrepreneurial inventor who has been working with smart textiles since 2004. She founded and led the Smart Textiles Innovation Lab at Welspun (one of the largest home textiles manufacturers in Asia) and went on to develop, manage and launch smart home textile products on the global market with the company’s corporate start.
Christian Dalsgaard, Chair
Christian is a leader with considerable expertise in the field of commercializing smart textile developments. His knowledge of the field spans more than a decade from the early stages of R&D in materials and integration of smart functions in garments to developments for the European Space Agency, ESA. Today Christian holds a position as Senior Consultant at the Danish Technological Institute in Functional Materials and chairs the board of the Smart Textile Alliance.
Anne Jensen
Anne is an experienced coordinator of smart textile projects, who has led proposal development to coordination and administration of successful innovative projects since 2005. Her extensive knowledge of the industry is a strong base for expanding stakeholder activities, driving new initiatives and identifying funding programmes for potential projects.
Independence
Relying on engagement from the community it serves, STA is not driven by profit motives. As an independent body, our aim is to bring together industry partners, drive standard development, and promote solutions that are interoperable. We are not a conventional standardization body, we are an association dedicated to converting established components into open standards consensually agreed by companies in the supply chain.