Our founder Michael John Lynch authored a study with colleagues at the University of Southampton,examining why e-textiles struggle to move beyond the research stage and into commercial product. The paper, “Breaking Barriers in E-Textile Production: Industry-Driven Solutions for Scaling,” was presented at the 2024 E-Textiles Conference and drew on interviews with more than 30 industry professionals across wearable technology startups, established electronics manufacturers, and apparel companies.
The core problem isn’t the technology
E-textile fabrication means merging two industry titans that have never really had to talk to each other properly, apparel manufacturing and electronics manufacturing. Each side has long-established processes on its own. The friction shows up in the join.
One of the clearest examples in the research is the word “prototype” itself. A garment developer means a physical sample used to test fit and fabric feel. An electronics engineer means a working circuit board, judged on performance rather than how it fits into a garment. An application software developer means an early build of an interface that probably doesn’t fully work yet. Three teams, three completely different meanings for the same word, and that’s before any of the harder technical disagreements begin.
That mismatch compounds through every stage of a project. Tech packs, electronic specifications, and software specs are built for entirely different audiences, using entirely different tools, revised on entirely different timelines. Several companies in the study tried hiring a single technical lead to bridge all of it, and in every case, that person’s expertise was skewed too far toward one discipline to hold the whole thing together.
The second problem is intellectual property, and it catches people early
Smaller businesses and academic spinouts in particular struggle here. One participant described launching a product only to receive an infringement notice from a competitor, their team had assumed that combining existing development boards didn’t constitute anything patentable. It unfortunately did, and the resulting licensing agreement restricted what they could build afterward. Another participant, from an academic spinout, found they couldn’t fully commercialise their own innovation because of prior art buried in their own team’s published research, and their university’s IP department was too generalist to catch it.
What the research recommends
Two practical pathways emerged from the interviews. First, an impartial panel of industry experts offering technical due diligence, giving smaller businesses a way to get an honest, external read on product viability, manufacturability, and regulatory fit. Second, structured IP support built specifically for smaller e-textile businesses, covering invention disclosure, prior art analysis, and freedom-to-operate.
Read the full paper
Lynch, M.J., Torah, R., Komolafe, A., Beeby, S. (2024). Breaking Barriers in E-Textile Production: Industry-Driven Solutions for Scaling. 2024 International Conference on the Challenges, Opportunities, Innovations and Applications in Electronic Textiles (E-Textiles), 71-77.
Read on IEEE Xplore · DOI: 10.23919/E-Textiles63767.2024.10914230