Pablo Isla, Chairman and CEO of Inditex, signed a $4 million multi-year agreement with Rafael Reif, President, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), to jointly pursue technological research initiatives. As part of the agreement Inditex will fund MIT research initiatives relating to the circular economy and new technology associated with sustainability and the recycling of textile materials, in addition to new lines of research related to data analysis.

The agreement supports MIT research by creating two Inditex fellowships in sustainability and operations. The Inditex Materials Science and Engineering Fellowship Fund within the MIT Department of Materials Science and Engineering will receive $1 million from Inditex to promote research into the areas of sustainability, logistics, and supply chain management.

The Inditex Operations Research and Management Fellowship Fund within the MIT Sloan School of Management will receive $1 million in funding from Inditex to Foster research and innovation in data analysis and prescriptive and predictive models applied to the textiles industry.

Inditex will also collaborate with the MIT Institute for Data, Systems, and Society to further research in areas such as artificial intelligence, automated learning, and data science with a multi-year contribution of $1.2 million.

The agreement will also renew the Leaders for Global Operations Master (LGO), Inditex’s scholarship program for MIT students, backed by the MIT School of Engineering and the MIT Sloan School of Management. It will also launch a new round of the MIT-Spain INDITEX Sustainability Seed fund for the promotion of research initiatives between faculty members and students from MIT and their peers at universities and research institutions in Spain.