Steering Group

Philippe Vanrie is since 1999 the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of EBN, the leading pan-European Network bringing together 200 accredited Business & Innovation Centres (BICs), Innovation-based Incubators, and Entrepreneurship Centres across Europe and beyond. Philippe was instrumental in developing this unique community gathering thousands of smart innovators and entrepreneurs. A recognized expert and experienced speaker in innovation and incubation, Philippe has developed strong relationship and several collaborative projects with the European Commission (EC), the European Space Agency (ESA), and a series of national & regional Governmental Agencies. Graduated from the Gembloux (Belgium) Agronomic Engineering University, and from the University of Louvain (Belgium) in Innovation Management, Philippe started his career as statistician at the University of Brussels (ULB) and then joined the first European EC-BIC (Business and Innovation Centre) in Liège. Afterwards, he joined the private sector where he had senior Marketing and Business Development responsibilities within several SMEs leaders of their market, notably in Agro and Food Industry. During the last couple of years, Philippe initiated and conducted several partnerships between EBN small business incubation centres and several industry leaders such as BT, Procter & Gamble, Oracle, Hewlett-Packard, Cisco, and Auchan. He also conducted pilot-schemes in the field of academic and industrial spin-off, clustering, international business cooperation, local economic development and technology transfer. Philippe has also served as an Advisory Board Member of the H-P Micro-Enterprise Acceleration Institute (MEA-I), the European Centre for Innovation in Geo-spatial and Location-Based Service, the European Region Research and Innovation Network (ERRIN), the International Network for SMEs (INSME), the Europa InterCluster Network, and has been chairing in 2010 the Jury of the 'Young European hopes of innovation'.

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