Mission and History
Corporate mission
To be a world-leading open-innovation R&D centre, creating generic technologies in the fields of Wireless Autonomous Transducer Solutions and Systems-in-Foil, enhancing the innovative power of our local and international industrial partners by bringing together their researchers with our own talent and researchers from our academic partners to jointly execute shared research programs.
History
The impulse to create Holst Centre came from Philips Research. In 2004, the management of Philips Research set a new strategy that would rely more strongly on “Open Innovation”. This would allow the influx of external technologies and concepts into all stages of its innovation funnel. Philips approached imec (Flanders) and TNO (Netherlands) to come up with a proposal for an independent research centre with a focus on specific sub-domains in the field of micro- and nanotechnology. In 2005, Holst Centre was founded as a public-private precompetitive research initiative with an independent research roadmap set up in dialogue with academic and industrial partners.
About Gilles Holst
Dutch physicist Gilles Holst (1886 - 1968) was the first employee and director of the Philips Physics Laboratory (NatLab) in Eindhoven. During his academic research career, he studied the electrical resistance of metals cooled in liquid Helium (-270ºC) and thereby pioneered in the discovery of superconductivity in metals. In 1914, Gilles Holst became director of NatLab. One of his talents was evaluating the maturity and market value of emerging technologies. Holst Centre honors the name of Gilles Holst by carrying on this talent and bridging the gap between academic and industrial technologies.