On August 19, the UT, the Province of Overijssel and the city of Enschede signed an agreement describing how the three parties will collaborate on the physical and intrinsic development of Knowledge Park Twente.
The arrival of young, knowledge-intensive businesses should, if all goes well, produce ten thousand jobs by 2010. The Executive Board calls the plans `quite ambitious,' but certainly attainable. Those ten thousand jobs are twice as many as the number of jobs that were created over the past fifteen years through the UT. By 2008, the knowledge park should have produced thirty new knowledge-intensive businesses and five hundred new jobs.
Since Harry van den Broonenberg first served as rector magnificus (in the early 1980s), the UT has accumulated much experience and expertise in stimulating new activity and knowledge valorization, but until recently its effort was limited mostly to offering the successful TOP-arrangement for young starters. The general consensus is that it can and must be done more professionally, as quickly as possible.
A new concept is the `accelerator' whom the UT employs to boost contacts and the resulting initiatives. Accelerators use their specific market knowledge to bring science and commerce together. Researchers usually cannot do that on their own, nor can businesses.
Business accelerator Frank-Jan van de Velde has been working for the BMTI institute since April. His field of activity includes tissue engineering. At the signing meeting, Van de Velde reported that four spin-offs had already formed: Porogen, Progentix, Micro Candela Systems and CellCoTec, all of which are involved in various aspects of biomedical materials or optics.
The focus of Knowledge Park Twente is linked to UT research in the spearhead institutes. Another partner in Knowledge Park Twente is the Dutch-German Internet Exchange (Ndix), which has offices in Enschede (opposite the UT) and Münster. Ndix is described as the virtual meeting and marketplace for businesses and knowledge institutes such as the UT.
The plans will be supported by the state (although the amount is still unknown) and the province (five million euros). The UT itself contributes at least half a million euros per year to the `enterprise.' The ministry for Housing, Regional Development and Environment (VROM) and the ministry for Economic Affairs have agreed to actively collaborate on realizing the plans, which the UT will introduce to the other technical universities.
Executive Board member Willem te Beest, who is a member of the Knowledge Park Steering Committee with Erik Helder (councilman in Enschede) and C. Abbenhues (member of the Provincial Executive for the Province of Overijssel), expects a strong increase in activity around UT institutes over the coming years. His example is Mesa+, a popular place of business for young entrepreneurs. Furthermore, he does not exclude the possibility of an institute like TNO (Dutch Organization for Applied Scientific Research) and a nanotechnology institute coming to campus in the long-term to support Mesa+. He also expects more accelerators to be appointed.
The presentation revealed that Knowledge Park Twente is an important part of the East Knowledge Policy and Vision Triangle. This vision encompasses Food Valley (Wageningen), Health Valley (Arnhem-Nijmegen) and Technology Valley (Twente).
Trans. Jeroen Latour
