A high-tech and research hotspot to host a wide variety of companies at a joint location. The Campus hosted different Philips laboratories and sales departments. By opening its doors to other companies, institutes, researchers, developers and entrepreneurs, HTCE has managed to achieve cooperation in the fields of Health, Energy and Smart Environments.
HTCE is a high tech centre and R&D ecosystem, which was initially owned by Philips. It was founded in 1998, and it was opened to non-Philips companies in 2003. HTCE was sold to Chalet Group in 2012, and is now an independent organisation. It houses more than 125 companies and institutions, comprising over 10,000 R&D-staff and entrepreneurs of 50 nationalities. The facilities are shared among the companies, which take part in the initiative. This helps to create the right atmosphere in order to accelerate technological innovation by sharing their knowledge and expertise.
The aim of the initiative was to create a high-tech and research hotspot to host a wide variety of companies at a joint location. The Campus hosted different Philips laboratories and sales departments. By opening its doors to other companies; institutes, researchers, developers and entrepreneurs; HTCE has managed to achieve cooperation in the fields of Health, Energy and Smart Environments.
HTCE is made of technology-dedicated sub-ecosystems, co-located in separate spaces. The business benefits to kick-start high-tech innovation include:
- The people: tap into high-tech expertise: People from over 85 nations make up our community on High Tech Campus Eindhoven. The Campus has attracted over 10,000 highly-qualified people that are truly the best in their field. Another 50,000 high-tech professionals work in the surrounding region, called “Brain port”.
- The potential of the international campus network: The wide variety of social and professional networks help creating a community with a strong underlying tissue.
- The high-tech power network, key to the success of High Tech Campus Eindhoven, with more than 135 leading tech companies, large and small are located at the Campus. There are multinationals such as Philips, NXP and Intel, as well as research institutes such as Holst Centre and Solliance. The cluster of research centres is constantly growing.
- Open collaboration, having built on a unique ecosystem of established global brands, leading research institutes, fast growth enterprises, high-tech start-ups and service companies with a fully open set-up.
- Invention capital attracts access to finance: The reputation for success keeps growing because Campus companies are attracting foreign capital.
- Access to world class research & testing facilities: The Campus offers a broad range of advanced innovation services, expertise and high-tech facilities supporting concept creation, product development, prototyping and small series production, sustainability and industrial process consulting.
- Full support for high-tech start-ups: in our ecosystem they execute, validate, find the right funding and scale up at the right pace. There’s also a Startupbootcamp HighTechXL branch located on the Campus.
- Well connected through international transport facilities.
The whole HTCE is based on the creation of innovation-driven contacts and networks. The overall setup facilitates the creation of scientific, technological and social networks of scientists and innovators.
The High-Tech Campus Eindhoven is an open innovation oriented ecosystem starting with the attraction of innovative people, research groups and companies and building on the attracted talents to support the growth of an innovative environment and innovation environment which is self-sustaining.
It shows how the initial co-location can develop into a tightly knit innovation cooperation network building on size, critical mass and high level scientific knowledge and capabilities.
There are not necessarily support services provided by the operators of the infrastructure itself, but the HTCE attracts innovators and also support service providers.
One of its strengths is to attract venture capitalists who are particularly capable of supporting fast growing start-ups.
HTCE can be considered one of the best practices to build and sustain an open innovation ecosystem, which was initially closed and the opened up. It is very well suited to demonstrate how such a system can actually work.
The key factors are:
- attraction
- placement: geographical but also scientific, industrial and technological
- knowledge and skill ecosystem
- communication
- technological facilities
- physical infrastructure
