Gerjan Van De Walle Archives - InnovationManagement

GERJAN VAN DE WALLE

Gerjan van de Walle is Business Development Manager at Philips Research. He was one of the promoters to the initiative to open up Philips’ research facility at Eindhoven, The Netherlands, to other companies in 2003 and to creating MiPlaza with shared laboratory and personnel resources for microelectronics development.

Philips Research employs over 1.800 people with laboratory facilities in Europe, North America and Asia. More than one patent per scientist is filed every year.

MiPlaza is an official division of Philips Research, located at the High Tech Campus. MiPlaza employs around 300 engineers and technical staff and operates several laboratories.

How Philips’ Open Campus Breeds Innovation

As Business Development Manager at Philips Research, Gerjan van de Walle was instrumental in opening up the electronics giant’s development facility in The Netherlands to competing companies, and making open innovation the ‘buzzwords of the day’. InnovationManagement.se asked him about the process, the difficulties he had to overcome and the advantages are of cramming thousands of engineers and researchers into one square kilometre.