The African saying tells us that “If you want to go quickly, go alone. If you want to go far, go together”, implying that doing things together is the slow way to proceed. While this was true in the past and might still be true in the African Savannah, this is no longer the case in the VUCA world of today. The Internet and the rise of the network economy increased the overall speed of the business environment. Today it is impossible to keep up with the speed of change by innovating in solitude. 

By working together smartly, you can combine different disciplines and innovate faster than the competition. You don't have to build up your own expertise in every discipline. New application domains for technologies such as AR/VR, IoT and AI always rely on smart combinations of different backgrounds and disciplines. In order to achieve successful innovations, combinations must be sought, often across company boundaries. The partnerships must be worked out broader and deeper than the traditional customer/supplier.

Smart collaboration is in the DNA of Piet Verhoeve. After his engineering studies at KU Leuven, Piet Verhoeve obtained a PhD at UGent, where he gained a lot of firsthand collaboration experience in European projects.
As CTO of Televic, he introduced a collaboration strategy that enabled Televic to create innovative products and bring them successfully to market, helping the company grow from a local SME into a world-class enterprise
He acquired strong collaboration program experience as Director ICON at iMinds/imec; the imec.icon program focuses on combining industry and academic research. ​In 2018 he kickstarted the successful co-creation hub Hangar K in Kortrijk.

His large experience on how to build strong & successful partnerships was published in the book Win-Winnovatie (Win-Winnovation), which was praised as the best book in the category "Learn & Development".
Piet is also a visiting professor at UGent and KULeuven. In his free time, he loves to cook and bake. He supports initiatives that make young people enthusiastic about technical or scientific studies and is an active coach at Coderdojo Menen and Ieper.