Rui Martins, from Inovafil, opened the session by letting all participants know about Inovafil and its innovation strategy, as well as some of its products already on the market. Within the question of innovation, Rui Martins highlighted the NIDYARN project, which, in addition to being promoted by the company Inovafil Fiação, SA, has the co-promotion of the Center for Textile Science and Technology (2C2T) and the International Fibrenamics Platform of the University do Minho. Having as main objective the constitution of a research and development nucleus within the scope of high functional performance threads, NIDYARN intends to explore nanotechnology through nanofibers and nanoparticles and, for this, the cooperative relationship with the University is essential. In this sense, Rui Martins believes that “Fibrenamics puts us (in Inovafil) in a position of knowledge on a worldwide scale”.

This initiative also counted on the presence of Lubos Hes, professor at the University of Liberec, who made a presentation on “Evaluation of the thermal comfort of textiles for sport in the wet state”, allowing the R&D center to be elucidated about some issues of more scientific nature. For Lubos Hes, “comfort is a very important parameter in the market” and for that, it is essential to understand the structure of textile comfort.

This open-day ended with a visit to the facilities of Inovafil, where all participants had the opportunity to understand the whole process behind the creation of high quality yarns and to question Rui Martins about some more technical notions. For Rui Martins, this type of actions is very important, as “it makes no sense for us to develop projects if we are not able to disseminate them and pass them abroad, either to the final consumer, contributing to the training and information of the consumer, both for customers and the market. This is a chain, the spinning is the beginning of the chain and we have to be connected with our customers, and that is why these meetings are very important”.

With regard to the project, Rui Martins assures that it is running within the expected timings and that Inovafil has many expectations, especially with regard to nanotechnology “which is unknown to us (company), but with the help of the university, that it has been studying this future trend for some time, we will test it and see how it can be applied to our products ”.

The NIDYARN is an example of perfect symbiosis between the academic and business environment that promotes the opportunity for its promoters to share their skills, foster internal and internal networking, and reinforce their capabilities and R&D character in the area of ​​functional threads.