Eindhoven is a municipality and a city located in the province of North Brabant in the south of the Netherlands, originally at the confluence of the Dommel and Gender streams. The Gender was dammed off short of the city centre in the 1950s, but the Dommel still runs through the city. The city counts 213,809 inhabitants (1 January 2010), which makes it the fifth-largest city of the Netherlands and the biggest of North-Brabant.
Eindhoven has long been a centre of cooperation between research institutes and industry. This tradition started with Philips (the NatLab was a physical expression of this) and has since expanded to large cooperative networks. The university hosts an incubator for technology startups (called the Twinning Center) and the NatLab has developed into the High Tech Campus Eindhoven. Also, TNO has opened a branch on the university campus. This tradition has also fostered inter-industry cooperation in the region; one example of this is the announcement in September 2010 of a new research lab for high-grade packaging materials, a cooperation of IPS Packaging and Thales Cryognetics. This cooperative tradition has also developed into a different direction than the traditional technology research done at the university. Starting in 2002, the university, the Catharina hospital, Philips Medical and the University of Maastricht joined forces and started joint research into biomedical science, technology and engineering. Within Eindhoven, this research has been concentrated in a new university faculty (BioMedical Technology or BMT). This development has also made Eindhoven a biomedical technology hub within the country and its (European) region.
Due to its high-tech environment, Eindhoven is part of several initiatives to develop, foster and increase a knowledge economy. As a result of these efforts, the Intelligent Community Forum has named the Eindhoven metro region one of the top-21 intelligent communities in 2008 and one of the top-7 intelligent communities in 2009, 2010 and 2011. Eindhoven is one of co-location centres of Knowledge and Innovation Community (Sustainable Energy) of The European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT). InnoEnergy is a strongly integrated alliance of reputable players from the education, research and industry sectors. It was created based on long standing links of cooperation as well as the principles of excellence and transformation. The partners have jointly developed a strategy to tackle the weaknesses of the European innovation landscape and aim to be the leading motor for innovation in the field of sustainable energy.The KIC will create economical and societal value by developing ideas from mind to market. Eindhoven is served by a large number of schools both at primary and secondary education levels. In addition, Eindhoven is a higher-education hub within the southern Netherlands, with several institutes of higher education that serve students from the extended region of North Brabant, Zeeland, Limburg and parts of the surrounding provinces.
