Biography

Biography

Smart collaboration is core to my career and my DNA. After my engineering studies at KU Leuven, I obtained a PhD at UGent. During this period I gained a lot of firsthand collaboration experience in several European projects.

As CTO of Televic, I successfully 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.

I acquired strong collaboration program experience as Director ICON at iMinds/imec; the imec.icon program focuses on combining industry and academic research. ​In 2018 I started the successful co-creation hub Hangar K in Kortrijk. Recently I created and kickstarted the flanders.healthTech ecosystem: a cluster of 80+ companies in digital technologies, biotech and medical technologies co-creating healthcare innovations which made him win the award for Best Open Innovation Practice 2022.

My large experience on how to build strong & successful partnerships is published in the book Win-Winnovation (available in English & Dutch), which was praised as the best book in the category "Learn & Development".

I'm also visiting professor at UGent. In my free time, I loves to cook and bake. I'm supporting initiatives that make young people enthusiastic about technical or scientific studies and am an active coach at Coderdojo Menen and Ieper.