Public, Industrial Agreements Enable Further Growth of Holst Centre

Holst Centre expresses its gratitude for the renewed public funding and a number of new industrial partnerships, which enable its growth plans for the coming years. The open-innovation initiative by imec (Belgium) and TNO (The Netherlands) will use the renewed trust to remain on the forefront of technology innovation. By realizing joint breakthroughs with its industrial and academic partners in the domains of flexible electronics and wireless sensor nodes, the Holst Centre results will help answering mayor societal challenges in healthcare, energy etc.

In a world where cost and complexity of research and development become too high to be overseen by individual companies, research institutes like Holst Centre play a key orchestrating role. Holst Centre facilitates innovations by bringing together its own research staff with researchers from partner companies and universities. By bringing together people with varied backgrounds, it combines all expertise that is needed to tackle research problems from different angles.

At the foundation of Holst Centre lies a reasonable amount of public funding. The Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs supported Holst Centre’s during its startup period from 2005-2012. The total amount of public funding that was needed to enable further growth of Holst Centre for the coming four years amounted to €72 million.

This budget has now been made available, combining efforts by several governments and organizations: the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs, Agriculture and Innovation, the province of Noord-Brabant, the Brainport Eindhoven region, imec, TNO, the Dutch Organization of Scientific Research (NWO) and a fiscal ruling (called TKI toeslag) issued by the Dutch government. The diverse nature of this funding will not influence the daily operations of Holst Centre, allowing it to continue its open-innovation strategy.

Over the coming years, the main growth of Holst Centre will be realized by increased industrial participations. Five new partnerships that have been signed over the past weeks illustrate this trend. Details of these new industrial partnerships will be announced over the coming weeks.

Jaap Lombaers and Bert Gyselinckx, managing Directors Holst Centre, said, “People who take part in Holst Centre will confirm that it’s all about the excitement and motivation of bringing innovative technologies to the industry and to the benefit of society. Illustrations are our recent efforts in helping companies bringing our technologies for wireless cardiac monitoring (ECG) to the market. Or the fact that several of our breakthroughs in flexible electronics are being taken into production by our partners. We are very grateful about the trust that we recently received. It shows that we have succeeded to become a center with regional and global impact and relevance and it motivates us to do even better in the coming years.”