Innventia has recently received requests from many companies to make use of its expertise and initiate R&D activities within the tissue area. Innventia therefore has proposed a new tissue research cluster to start in 2010. Innventia possesses a range of both technical and human resources that now will be channelled into the tissue area.The overall objective of the activities in the new cluster is to take steps forward in order to improve the competitiveness of the products and processes of the participating companies. The activities are structured into three projects. The objectives of the three projects are:Low energy fibers and processes (identify fibrous raw material and process conditions that produce high quality tissue at ten percent reduction of the specific energy consumption); Absorption of tissue products (improve the absorption properties of tissue products by identifying new methods for characterizing the dynamic liquid absorption and wet resiliency of tissue products, and by applying these methods in benchmarking studies in order to better understand the influence of raw material, additives and converting process parameters on the absorption properties of tissue products); and surface and tactile evaluation (identify novel methods for the characterization of the tissue surface and the tactile properties of tissue products; benchmark measurement results obtained with the novel method with results from panel test based on sensory analysis for a set of samples; and investigate a possibility to develop a haptic display system in a virtual environment).