"Although Europe keeps the world-wide leadership in the textile market, Far East has become a major manufacturing area. This situation opened new perspectives in fast growing markets for the European manufacturers of textile machines, 95% of which are SMEs. However, as today textile machines mainly consist of established electro-mechanical systems the advantages were only of short duration. An intensive effort of the manufacturers of textile machines in Asian countries in introducing the production of cheaper textile machines comparable in output but incomparable in price has started. As a result, Far-East has become the first applicant in the world as far as the number of patents on new machines and equipment for textile manufacturing is concerned, almost filling the gap with Europe. This represents a major threat for European textile machinery SMEs, their competitiveness and knowledge base. To address this challenge in 2006 MANUTEX has been jointly launched by the European Technology Platform for Manufacturing (Manufuture) and the European Textile Technology Platform in order to realise closer collaboration in pre-competitive research and development at European level between the Textile and related Machinery Industries. In such a scenario, the NU-WAVE project represents an ambitious R&D programme between the European Textile Association EURATEX and VDMA/ACIMIT as National SME AGs representing 60% of textile machine manufacturing in EU-27, grouping the main stakeholders in the above mentioned MANUTEX initiative and key RTD players in the relevant knowledge areas. Advanced web-services provided by SME AGs will result from the project to support in the design of a new generation of flexible and high-performance machines."