At Stockholm City Hall, the site of the annual Nobel Prize banquet, 10 fashion startups received their due on Wednesday: 200,000 euros ($224,564) apiece, a bevy of plaudits and a place in the yearlong Global Change Award Changemaker Program, an accelerator run by the H&M Foundation in collaboration with Accenture and KTH Royal Institute of Technology.
The Global Change Award, now in its 11th year, has been referred to as the Nobel Prize of fashion. This year’s early-stage innovations range from AI-powered smartglasses that detect factory-floor defects in real time to spider-silk-inspired fibers produced by microorganisms and biodegradable leather alternatives made from seaweed. They promise, if not the “greatest benefit on humankind” that the original celebrates, then certainly some of the biggest gains for fashionkind.
Stockholm City Hall, as the H&M Foundation likes to quip, is “no stranger to big ideas.” Among them is an expanded definition of innovation itself.
Innovation will always be an important pillar of the award, said Christiane Dolva, the philanthropic organization’s head of innovation, research and demonstration. What she appreciates, however, is how broadly the award now defines the concept: “a new way of doing things that drives impact.” That means looking beyond the novel materials or new machinery that previous iterations of the prize homed in on without fully considering how they fit into the industry’s wider transformation.
That’s why the current cohort, which joins an alumni network nearly 70 companies strong, includes Alu, a U.S.-based fashion-tech platform that uses AI and behavioral psychology to turn digital product passports into tools that change consumer behavior.
“When we talk about sustainability, what’s missing is the last link in the value chain: the person who owns the clothes,” said Donatela Bellone, Alu’s founder and CEO. “We’re refining how brands adopt and scale post-purchase experiences, and that depends on understanding consumer behavior. How people behave can sometimes be as complex as, if not more complex than, chemistry, physics or biology.”
Another winner, EntroMetrix, is a U.K. company that builds physics-informed AI digital twins to help manufacturers optimize energy use, reduce waste and improve quality using the data and equipment they already have. Technologies like carbon capture or hydrogen remain years away from widespread adoption and are capital-intensive, said Mohammed Ali, its co-founder. Operational efficiency, by contrast, offers an immediate way for Tier 2 suppliers to cut emissions by up to 20 percent while also reducing costs, he said.
“One of the things we often hear from manufacturers is that they don’t have enough data, their equipment is too old or their factories aren’t digitally advanced enough to benefit from technologies like digital twins,” Ali said. “In fact, these are often the factories where our technology can make the biggest difference.”
Rhea’s Factory, a U.S. biotechnology startup that uses AI and engineered enzymes to transform contaminated plastic and textile waste into virgin-quality monomers, is another example of AI disrupting existing practices—this time in recycling.
“Most garments are blends with cotton, elastane or nylon, dyed and finished, and no recycling process can take them today: mechanical needs clean single-fiber input, and chemical routes choke on the contamination,” said Mert Topçu, its co-founder and chief technology officer. “Our AI-designed enzyme works on dirty, highly crystalline feedstock rather than clean lab plastic; our proprietary, patent-pending separation process recovers the monomers at a cost that makes the economics work, and the output is a true drop-in for existing polymerization lines.”
AI is also part of the approach at Tanzania’s KelTex, which produces bioleather from sustainably cultivated seaweed. The company is developing an AI-powered aquaculture solution to monitor cultivation conditions, track variations in seaweed growth and quality, and inform harvesting and farm management decisions.
“Combining AI-supported aquaculture management with stronger processing controls will help us reduce variability across batches and improve the consistency of the final material,” said Laetus Buberwa, KelTex’s co-founder and CEO. “Solving this challenge is essential to moving from promising prototypes to reliable materials that brands and manufacturers can confidently evaluate and eventually adopt.”
Beyond the ‘shiny new thing’
For Dolva, these winners represent a more expansive view of the Global Change Award’s four “areas of transformation”: sustainable materials and processes, responsible production, mindful consumption and wildcards. They also reflect a shift beyond the basic fiber swaps, material-only recycling fixes and conventional factory-level waste management that characterized its earlier approach.
She cited the example of Threadbridge, a Bangladeshi company whose AI-powered visual inspection tool flags defects as garments move down the production line, helping workers build technical skills and protect their livelihoods as part of a just transition to a greener economy.
“That shows how innovation can improve an existing process with people in mind, ensuring that from a workforce transition perspective, it is beneficial for workers, reduces waste and minimizes production errors, rather than just being a shiny new thing,” Dolva said.
That’s five innovations in a row with AI in the mix. Does Dolva worry that AI could pose an existential threat to humanity, as some researchers have warned? She shrugged.
“It’s such a fast-moving field that I feel almost intimidated trying to assess anything around it,” she said. “However, what we see from the innovations in the Global Change Award is that, applied for good, AI has massive potential. Beyond the technology, one thing about these changemakers that becomes so obvious to me is that no matter what level of AI they’re using, success is still very human. It comes down to the person, their ambition, passion and grit.”
One thing that hasn’t changed is the H&M Foundation’s desire to buoy new ideas, which often attract more hype and excitement than the tangible support they need to scale. With a growing focus on implementation, the prize and its accelerator network aim to help innovators navigate what Dolva described as the “difficult middle”: moving from proof of concept to industrial scale and price parity in partnership with manufacturers.
The collaboration needed to make that transition is also a “deeply human skillset,” she added.
The Global Change Award’s broader take on innovation also reflects the H&M Foundation’s efforts to identify which bets could make the biggest difference. The organization recently completed a multi-month strategic project to understand what Tier 2 manufacturers and other supply chain actors need to decarbonize the fashion industry. The effort included a widely distributed survey and more than 20 in-depth interviews with not just top management but also engineers on the factory floor, Dolva said. The organization also pored over 35 reports.
Historically, she said, Western brands issued top-down mandates telling suppliers in the global South what needed to be done. The H&M Foundation decided to flip that approach and ask: “What do you need around you to succeed?” Dolva called it “listening the other way.”
The findings were largely consistent and “not rocket science,” she said. Their significance, Dolva believes, lies less in what was said than in hearing it “directly from the people who are actually going to implement the solutions and who hold the power to reduce the majority of emissions.”
Manufacturers wanted access to funding and de-risking capital, affordable clean energy, technical assistance to move solutions from pilot stage to factory-wide adoption, support to reskill and upskill workers, and climate resilience measures to address impacts such as heat stress.
Already, those results are shaping the award’s upcoming nomination round, which will include climate adaptation and workforce transition among its priorities.
“Now we’re looking at building a pipeline of new projects within these priority areas, understanding where we as a philanthropic organization can play a role, and how our funds could unlock some of these topics,” Dolva said. “It’s going to be a journey that we’re going to embark on, with 2030 targets to ensure urgency.”
That emphasis on people, not just the solutions themselves, also underpins the Global Change Award, which prioritizes developing the changemaker behind each concept, Dolva said.
“Sometimes I think the changemakers we meet through GCA hold the potential to come up with so many different solutions that what they might be working on now, and the problem they might be solving for right now, is just one in a line of many,” she said. “I can imagine, in terms of how these bold people work, just going for it. I love that.”