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Longterm Cycles of Innovation in Europe's Textile Business

Longterm Cycles of Innovation in Europe's Textile Business

Bernd Hallier (European Retail Academy, Germany) and Violena Hubenova Nencheva (European Retail Academy, Mexico)
Copyright: © 2023 |Pages: 22
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-6684-7394-8.ch008
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Abstract

The textile business is an excellent example for permanent transformations of the lifestyle of consumers. The first cycle in the Darwinism of the European textile sector was dominated by traders' knowledge about the sources of the product-materials and opportunities for processing. In a second phase covering the start of industrial mass-production and professional mass-distribution, outlets for textiles were established with benchmarks at high frequency spots in down-towns of acclomerations like Berlin, Cologne, London, or Paris. Department stores became the anchor of cities and for life-style driven citizens. In the third phasis the outlet-dominance is attacked by IT-driven businesses by the development of tools like the European article numbering-system, chips and QR-codes, clouds for big data and data mining, artificial intelligence, and virtual reality. For the textile traders it is an improvement of the efficiency by the ability to control the total supply chain electronically. Of course, this is resulting in big changes for the supply patterns.
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Introduction

Textile Business as an Innovator

This Chapter deals with the long-term role of innovation within the textile sector as well as by the sector in society because consumer habits are heavily influenced. A special focus does have family-businesses as the textile sector has big clusters of small and medium-sized companies with families as owners. In the beginning of the 20ies of this century the sector is challenged not only by a unique speed of sector internal factors but also by unprecedented external factors. The question for the sector is if there will be resilience in the near future or if the market will be reduced in volume and number of players for the ongoing time.

Internal Factors of Innovation of businesses

The innovation of businesses is a permanent process initiated by thousands of individual decisions either to cut costs or to increase sales volume by product adaption. Academic pioneers to analyse emperial data about those processes are Kondratieff (1926) for macro-economics and Schumpeter (1961) for micro-economics. Innovation cycles in retail/wholesale as a sector-analysis has been systematically documented firstly by Hallier (1999a, 1999b, 2022a) based on reports about sub-groups of this spectrum (Hahn 1984; Hauptmann 1943; Birchall 1997; Bauer and Hallier, 1999, pp. 162-192; Zola 2004; Hallier et al. 2002, p. 155; Hallier et al. 2002, p. 210-212) or own observations.

Figure 1.

Long-term Innovation Cycles

978-1-6684-7394-8.ch008.f01
Source: Hallier, B.

The impact of innovations for the entrepreneurs and the changes of consumerism within the centuries as well as a prognosis of the future within the next decades can be summarized for example by the sub-group Textile Trade. Starting in the 20ies of this century shopping in an affluent society is mixing with entertainment: in future also inclusive gaming in a virtual world with avatares being sponsored by the branded goods industry of textiles or by outlet-chains. The final outfit of customers might be co-determind by long-distance partners in those games or it might be a decision tool for the planning of a meeting of a group of shoppers in a specific outlet at a certain date. The real world and the virtual world mix in a Metaversum.

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