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Future by Design: The New Codes of Luxury, Sportwear and Wellbeing

Challenge Metadata

Challenge Description

The Innovation Booster Fashion & Lifestyle empowers operational, technological, and social innovations developed with and for the Swiss Fashion and Lifestyle sector.

Leveraging the Leading House community and network, the Innovation Booster Fashion & Lifestyle creates a unique ecosystem enabling the dissemination of radical solutions to the challenges of the sector.

CALL FOR CHALLENGES SPECIFICATIONS

Call Opening: April 29th, 2026

Call Closing: September 24th, 2026

Co-Creation Workshop: October 13th, 2026 (EPFL - Lausanne)

Pitch Day: November 26th - EFPL, Lausanne

The Innovation Booster Fashion & Lifestyle invites companies, researchers, startups, experts, and innovators to submit sector-relevant challenges that can inspire the co-creation of radical ideas for the Swiss Fashion & Lifestyle ecosystem. Backed by Innosuisse, the program is designed to identify urgent and emerging market needs, bring together interdisciplinary stakeholders, and transform key industry challenges into new opportunities for innovation. Through an open and user-centric process, the most promising ideas can evolve into Innovation Teams and be further tested for desirability, viability, and feasibility.

The proposed challenge areas below reflect major transformation forces shaping the future of fashion, luxury, sportswear, and wellbeing: slower growth and rising selectivity in luxury, stronger demand for personalization and AI-enabled service, increasing relevance of wearables and health-oriented solutions, new opportunities in gaming and immersive attention environments, and mounting pressure for circularity, traceability, and end-of-life innovation in textiles.

Challenge topics

1) AI-Powered Personalization, Design and Client Experience

How might AI help fashion, luxury, and sportswear players create more relevant products, sharper merchandising decisions, smarter clienteling, and more personalized customer journeys across digital and physical touchpoints? This topic welcomes challenges related to AI-assisted design, product discovery, recommendation, service, customer care, and brand-consumer interaction.

2) Wearables, Smart Garments and Connected Performance

How might wearable technologies and smart textiles enhance performance, comfort, safety, recovery, or training outcomes? This topic focuses on connected apparel, embedded sensing, biometric monitoring, adaptive garments, and new product-service systems that create measurable value for athletes, active consumers, and performance-driven communities.

3) Luxury and Watchmaking Technology Innovation

How might technology strengthen the value proposition of luxury and watchmaking without compromising craftsmanship, exclusivity, heritage, and emotional appeal? This topic welcomes challenges related to traceability, authenticity, after-sales ecosystems, connected ownership, digital services, client experience, and new technologies that reinforce trust, rarity, and long-term brand relationships.

 

4) E-Sports, Gaming, Interactive Worlds and New Consumer Engagement Models

How might gaming ecosystems, interactive platforms, and virtual environments unlock new forms of product innovation, brand engagement, and community participation? This topic is open to challenges related to wearable gaming, AI-powered gaming experiences, branded interaction layers, digital identity, loyalty, fandom, and the use of gaming environments as spaces for discovery, participation, and value creation.

 

3) From Sports Performance to Preventive Health and Wellbeing

How might sportswear, equipment, and digital services evolve from performance tools into broader enablers of health, recovery, resilience, and everyday wellbeing? Challenges under this topic may address physical activity, sleep, recovery, mental wellbeing, personalized coaching, biomarker-informed services, and the convergence of sport, wellness, and health-oriented lifestyles.

 

6) Augmented Customer Experience and Sensory Commerce

How might brands reduce the gap between physical and digital experience by helping customers better perceive quality, fit, materiality, movement, or emotional value through a screen? This topic covers immersive commerce, augmented retail, virtual try-on, spatial interfaces, remote consultation, and digital experiences that make product interaction more intuitive, engaging, and tangible.

7) Circular Sportswear, Recycling and End-of-Life Innovation

How might the industry rethink the end of life of sportswear and fashion products through better design, recovery, reuse, repair, sorting, refurbishment, and recycling systems? This topic focuses on circular product development, reverse logistics, material recovery, recyclability, traceability, and scalable solutions that reduce waste and extend product value beyond first use.

8) New Business Models for Premium, Performance and Circular Growth

How might brands create new sources of value beyond the traditional model of product sales? This topic welcomes challenges related to subscription, resale, repair-as-a-service, product-as-a-service, upgrade programs, membership ecosystems, hybrid physical-digital propositions, and other business models that can unlock growth, loyalty, and stronger customer lifetime value.

HOW DOES IT WORK

STEP 1:

  1. Fill in the form to join the program starting from April 29th, 2026 
  2. In the form describe your innovation hypothesis defining it briefly in the dedicated field https://share.hsforms.com/1Zo44DdZ7SX-W8XH-elbfRw4m7jf 
  3. Confirm your availability to participate in-person in the mandatory workshop on October 13th, 2026 – ‘Challenge Your Ideas’ in Lausanne at EPFL
  4. Submit your Innovation Hypothesis on the jointcreate platform by September 24th, 2026

Required fields:

  • Picture
  • Hypothesis name (“Project Idea Name” field)
  • Short description (paste your Innovation Hypothesis)
  • Set privacy option to “Publish” and “Open”
  • Add your Lead Organization
  • Click on “Create” button to submit

STEP 2:

  1. Your submission will be evaluated by the Innovation Booster Team
  2. You will be notified with the result
  3. Innovation Teams formation will be facilitated to find the best research or implementation partner if not already present

STEP 3:

  1. Participate in the Co-creation Workshop 'Challenge your ideas' in Lausanne at EPFL on October 13th, 2026
  2. Industry problems and challenges will be explored to discover the underlying assumptions
  3. Collaboration among different stakeholders and experts will support you with Design Thinking methodology to co-create ideas for radical solutions

STEP 4:

  1. Submit your refined idea by September 24th, 2026*

*Guidelines will be shared during and after the 'Challenge your ideas' Workshop to ensure a proper submission before the deadline.

STEP 5:
  1. Once all the Innovation hypothesis have been gathered after the September 24th, 2026 deadline and refinement phase, the jury of the Innovation Booster Fashion & Lifestyle program, which includes experts and decision-makers from the industry, will vote for the best ones to join the final step of the competition, the Pitch Day.

STEP 6:

  1. An optional virtual workshop, Innovation Arena, will take place on October 29th 2026 to help you enrich and refine your idea, preparing for the Pitch Day on November 26th, 2026.

STEP 7:

  1. Pitch Day: on November 26th, 2026 submitted ideas will be pitched to the program Jury and the selected 5 winning ideas will be awarded with ≈ CHF 28'000.-
  2. The awarded ideas will be announced on December 3rd, 2026

IMPORTANT

  • The Call opens on April 29th,  2026
  • The submission deadline is September 24th, 2026
  • Participation in the Workshop 'Challenge your ideas' on October 13th, 2026 is mandatory for ideas to be eligible to access the Pitch Day and receive funding
  • The final Pitch Day will take place on November 26th, 2026

An Innovation Hypothesis is a potential new approach to solve an existing Industry problem, to be further explored and developed with the help of experts and fellow innovation team members during the dedicated workshop on October 13th, 2026.

This is a call for challenges and not a call for ideas.

The program focuses on the very first stages of the innovation funnel to seek new approaches to solve current Industry problems with the objective of idea testing.

WHO CAN APPLY

You can apply between April 29th and September 24th, 2026 if you are a:

  1. Start-up/Scale-up
  2. SME
  3. Large organisation
  4. Any company offering products, services or process implementation
  5. Non-profit organisation
  6. Association
  7. University research institute
  8. Non-commercial research centre
  9. Departmental research institution
  10. Federal research institute

NOTE: Innovation teams must be formed to pitch the idea on November 26th, 2026 and be funded. Innovation teams consist of at least one research partner and one implementation partner. Please state in the form if you already identified an Innovation team partner.

APPLY NOW!

The Call is open from April 29th to September 24th, 2026.

Tell us more about how you would like to address a mentioned industry challenge and participate in the Workshop 'Challenge your ideas' on October 13th, 2026 in Lugano to:

  1. Develop a new product, service, process or business model
  2. Make a positive impact on the Swiss Fashion & Lifestyle industry and society
  3. Be aligned with our core values expressed in our Manifesto: Sustainability, Diversity, Inclusion and Equality, User-centricity, Trustworthiness and Collaboration
  4. Have the opportunity to work with industry experts and leading researchers in Switzerland and co-create new potential and radical innovative ideas
  5. Be funded and test the potential of your idea at the Pitch Day on November 26th, 2026

For more information, please contact us at: info@ibfashionandlifestyle.ch