Issue 18 winter 09

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High Tech Campus Eindhoven was established ten years ago on land alongside some of Philips Research’s key facilities. Since then it has become home to more than 90 companies and institutes, and 7000 researchers, developers and entrepreneurs, who together form an open innovation ecosystem. My job is to make sure that ecosystem flourishes.

We see open innovation as key to the success of the Campus. We already host a number of organisations that are based on the principles of open innovation, such as the Holst Centre, the Center for Translational Molecular Medicine, and the Océ Inkjet Application Centre.

Providing the right facilities

We work hard to ensure that the Campus has the right business and technical infrastructure to support open innovation for companies ranging in size from start-ups to multinationals. For example, Philips has taken one of its on-site research facilities and set it up as MiPlaza, an independent subsidiary that sells research services. Its hotel-like approach means that start-ups can access equipment and services that would otherwise be beyond their reach. MiPlaza is already making more than half of its revenue from customers that are not part of Philips.

We try to ensure that service companies are available to support our start-ups

On the business front, we try to ensure that service companies are available to support our start-ups so we have venture capital, public relations and recruitment offices on the Campus. We also have advisors who can help R&D people think about business, and help them to learn to speak its language.

There’s a specific building for start-ups that is home to 45 companies, most of them employing between two and five people, all from a technology background. They can call on the Campus site management and others throughout our network to discuss their business options, communications and so on. It is our role to help them run a business so they can focus on developing their technology.

When start-ups develop into small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) we give them slightly less attention, so that they can get on with running their businesses. Once companies are SMEs, our role is to get them to make contact with companies on or around the Campus and to remain part of the Campus network, as well as developing relationships with bigger companies. One third of the businesses on the Campus are the Dutch offices of international companies.

The Campus site management tries to ensure that this infrastructure is up to date, so we are instrumental in finding partners to invest in these facilities.

Stimulating interaction

If the Campus is going to thrive through open innovation, we have to make sure that it is easy for people and companies to meet each other in both planned and unplanned ways.

Campus residents commit to using central facilities

The Campus has something we call The Strip, a 400m-long building full of restaurants, cafes, sports facilities, meeting and seminar rooms. Campus residents have to commit to using these central facilities, rather than setting up their own canteens and meeting rooms. What this means is that you see a lot of interaction, over breakfast when people are starting the day, during lunchtime when some 2,500 people come in, and during the evenings over informal drinks or at the gym. The Strip has turned out to be one of the most important elements of the Campus.

Making it possible for residents to bump into friends for coffee is fine, but we also take a more active role in stimulating interaction between residents. We have formal tools such as seminar series and keynote speeches, and informal tools such as leisure activities, sports, bicycle markets and concerts where people who would not otherwise meet can find each other. We want to get our residents out of their usual environments and expose them to each other so that there is lots of communication.

Building networks

We also try and draw in people from beyond the Campus, for example from our three key technical universities: the University of Twente, Delft University of Technology, and Eindhoven University of Technology. And we liaise with the TiasNimbas Business School at Tilburg University (in association with Eindhoven University of Technology), to form a Campus network that includes academics, R&D and business-creation specialists.

At national and international level we’re developing links to other campuses, ecosystems and areas of excellence. We need to constantly strengthen these links, in order to make our ecosystem more open and to avoid becoming complacent in the competition for relationships with the world’s best. So we have links to the Eindhoven, Aachen, Leuven triangle, which links the Netherlands, Germany and Belgium. Philips, which hosts the Campus, also has links to the University of Cambridge, and we’re trying to use that relationship to strengthen that link.

It's all about opening up, to avoid the atmosphere on the Campus becoming too inward and unhealthy.

More than a landlord

Many science parks are criticised for being little more than landlords of a site with a fancy name and a logo. The Campus site management works to ensure that the Campus is much more than this.

We have clearly defined the kinds of technologies we want to have on the Campus

For example, we have clearly defined the kinds of technologies we want to have on the Campus. We're not in pharmaceuticals or chemicals, but we are interested in health and in the ‘experience economy’ – innovation focused on people. Having defined the areas of innovation that we want to encourage on the Campus, we have also defined their underlying technologies, such as high-technology systems, microsystems, embedded systems, life sciences and infotainment.

We then try and find new entrants to the Campus that would be a good fit with what is already on site. It's not our goal to increase the number of companies here regardless of what they do, but to maintain the quality of the ecosystem. So we’re constantly trying to entice R&D labs from other countries to come here to both benefit from, and enrich, our ecosystem.

Some of this work is done with the Brainport organisation (named to contrast with Rotterdam as the home of our seaport, and Amsterdam as the home to our airport and financial sector), which represents high technology in the south-east of the Netherlands, and some with the Province of Noord-Brabant, which provides links to our embassies.

Measuring success

Does the Campus approach work? As you might expect, we use a number of measures to see if all this effort is making a difference. For example, we have found that half of all the patents filed in the Netherlands come from the Brainport region. And we have found that 95% of the patents filed in the Brainport region are filed from the Campus, a single square kilometre in Eindhoven.

We also track the contribution of this part of the Netherlands to the gross national product. The businesses on and near the Campus contribute almost 12% of the Dutch gross domestic product, a close second to the contribution from the wider Amsterdam area, which includes the airport and the financial sector.

A third measurement of our success comes from monitoring the R&D expenditure in the region compared with the rest of the Netherlands and the Lisbon target of 3% of gross domestic product (GDP). The R&D intensity is 8% of gross regional product, compared with a figure for the Netherlands of 1.5% of GDP. And the Campus is accountable for a substantial part of this.

Since open innovation relies on people and their attitudes, we also measure these through an annual survey of Campus residents. We have a ‘net promoters score’, which summarises several questions designed to find out whether residents would recommend the Campus to friends or colleagues as a good place to work. We started the questionnaire at the end of October 2008 and we find that the pride in the Campus is high. Our role is to increase it.

This, perhaps, is one of the keys to creating an open innovation ecosystem. I think one very strong point about the success of Cambridge, England, as a technology hub is its brand, and people’s pride in that brand. We want to establish that sort of pride here, in the Campus and also in the Netherlands. It's an attractive area with lots of graduates who want to work here and we would like to build on that nationally and internationally through the technical universities, the government and the Brainport organisation.

The Campus is definitely not just a real-estate concept. It's actually an engine that drives open innovation, with knowledge as its fuel. Everything we do as the Campus site management team has to fit with that tag line.

Frans Schmetz

Managing director, High Tech Campus Eindhoven
frans.schmetz@philips.com

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