Innovation Cycles: A Case Study in the Textile Sector

The Textile Business is an excellent example of permanent transformations of the lifestyle of consumers. The oldest reports come from the traditional Silk Road, which connected Asia and Europe, and which was a chain of traders, connecting local transport knowledge step by step over thousands of kilometers. From the fourteenth century onward in Europe, in this sector, history has information about families which had an important impact on the development of the products, their processing, and distribution. The major innovations can be summarized in sector cycles. The first cycle in the European textile sector was dominated by traders’ knowledge about the sources of the product materials and opportunities for processing. The main focus of sales in that phase had been the upper classes, who could afford the import of exclusive materials. In a second phase, covering the start of industrial mass productionmass production and professional mass distribution, outlets for textiles were established with benchmarks at high-frequency spots in downtowns of agglomerations like Berlin, Cologne, London, or Paris. Department stores became the anchor of cities and for lifestyle-driven citizens. This period lasted till the 20’s of the last century. In the third phasis, the outlet dominance is attacked first by catalogues replacing new stores during the Economic Crisis of the last century and after World War II by IT-driven businesses by the development of tools like the European Article Number system, chips and QR-codes, clouds for Big Data and data mining. Phase 4 is the omni-channel distribution with 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; for the consumer, the potential interconnectivity with the internet and smartphones is an empowerment of demand because the choices for alternative points of sales are permanently increasing and mobile shopping decreases the dependence on locations of brick and stone. Of course, this results in big changes in the supply patterns and results in a Darwinism of retailers in the competition to adapt quick enough to create a return on investment. Additionally, in the 20’s of the twenty-first century, the sector is challenged by a series of strong global external factors, which cannot be influenced by the companies directly—but only by defensive actions for resilience. Within the cluster of the most hit companies are small- and medium-sized family businesses—often textile traders.