(Editor’s note: This post about Open Day at High Tech Campus Eindhoven is part of our Tech Tuesday series. Dispatches Europe tracks the tech scene – startups, scale-ups and mature companies – in Eindhoven because so many of our highly skilled internationals are engineers, physicists and developers.)
This is an event you really shouldn’t miss if you want to understand the giant tech research and development campus that drives this tech ecosystem.
Open Day on 11 June isn’t just an invitation to explore High Tech Campus Eindhoven. It’s an invitation to get up close and personal with some of the most innovative companies in the world from fast-growing startups to global tech giants such as Philips.
The theme of the day will be “Turning Dreams into Reality,” which is pretty much what happens on campus every day at the tech companies and research centers.
Because of the pandemic, this is the first Open Day since 2018. So, this will be a mega-event to celebrate welcoming the families of the 12,000-plus people who work on campus, along with everyone interested in knowing more about this tech ecosystem and even maybe finding a new careers.
Philips, Signify, Shimano, NXP, the new 5G Hub and AI Innovation Center and many other companies will open their doors for displays, demos, and activities.
For Open Day activities, the campus is divided into five zones – orange, blue, red, purple and green. Here’s the map, with each zone’s activities:
Featured activities
With dozens of campus companies and organizations participating, we can’t list everything. So here are some curated highlights:
• High Tech Campus has the largest startup/scale-up multi-building complex in the Netherlands. But you can sample HTCE’s newest companies all in one building, the new AI Innovation Center in HTC 5.
• There will be a mini-career day event on the first floor (second floor, to Americans) in the campus Conference Center.
• There will be Formula E race cars on display.
• PSV, Eindhoven’s professional football club, will hold football clinics for aspiring players
outside the Conference Center. If you’re lucky, you will get to see the PSV championship
cup, which will be on display for a very short period. The PSV team bus will be shuttling
Open Day visitors around campus, so hop on or hop off and check out the five activity zones.
• TMC will host a Mad Science fun station with scientific experiments for kids and a show,
featuring a robot race with the Throwabot. Kids can create their own light show with 3Beam.
• NXP, one of the most important semiconductor companies in the world, will open its technology showroom, a testing ground where NXP shows the cream of the crop in the field of innovation.
• High Tech Campus Eindhoven Cricket Association will show a brief video with an introduction to cricket, but the real fun begins with Cricket clinics for kids. They will also host a mini cricket competition for kids at the Frits Philips Sports Forest.
• The new 5G Hub invites the community to join a day full of fantastic experiences. You’ll
find stations with robot dogs, a remote-controlled car, Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality experiences and more. There will be demos for 5G die-hard techy fans, as well as for
curious minds of all ages.
• VRee will show the latest developments and technologies in terms of VR, training and
activation. They are also demonstrating a multiplayer VR-application in which two or more
people can perform various actions in the virtual world.
• Axelera AI will use Artificial Intelligence in a demo using facial recognition to create different
cartoon and non-cartoon types for children and adults.
• There will be a number of startups at the AI Innovation Hub.
• Next Nature will resent the NANO Supermarket, which shows speculative products that could hit the shelves in the next 10 years. Innovative and beautiful, uncanny and disturbing, but specifically designed to prompt discussion, the products provide us with thought-provoking scenarios that help us
decide what future we actually want.
• There will be food trucks, music, and an international festival-within-a-festival.
Will have an update with exactly where each activity will be.
Campus executives are expecting a record crowd after years of COVID-19 restrictions. Also, we should note that casually visiting High Tech Campus is a relatively new phenomenon for locals because the campus used to ultra-secure when it was Philips headquarters. In fact, many people in Eindhoven didn’t know it existed. So, HTC’s open campus is an anomaly. Apple has its $5 billion campus in Cupertino and there are other celebrated corporate complexes from Munich to Dubai. But those are closed to outsiders.
As we noted in 2017, High Tech Campus Eindhoven is an accessible oasis of innovation, not a walled garden of tech.
The details:
Open Day is part of the High Tech Discovery Route, kicking off the Dutch Technology Festival.
Date: Saturday, 11 June 2022
Time: 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.
There will be information points around the campus directing you to various attractions.
Entry is free
Click here for a map of the campus.
You can read more about Eindhoven’s world-changing innovations here in Dispatches’ archives.
Co-CEO of Dispatches Europe. A former military reporter, I'm a serial expat who has lived in France, Turkey, Germany and the Netherlands.
