Philippe currently works as Brussels representative and senior EU Advisor for the University of Vaasa (Western Finland); he also chairs the Horizon Europe Mutual Learning Exercise on Knowledge Valorisation (EC-DG RTD), and advice Noshaq (A belgian leading public/private Venture capital fund) as Investment Manager.
Engineer by education, he started his career at the University of Brussels (ULB) and then joined the first European Business & Innovation Centre in Liège (Socran, now Eklo), a public-private organisation supporting start-ups & scale-ups, and the economic development of the territory. He then entered the private sector where he held Marketing and Business Development responsibilities in Agro and Food Industry's SMEs.
Philippe joined EBN (European Network of Business Innovation & Incubation Centres) in 1992 and worked closely with the EC and more than 100 Business & Innovation Centres, Incubators & Accelerators, local & regional authorities & agencies. He conducted several innovation pilot-schemes in various thematic areas. Appointed CEO in 1999, he transformed EBN into a reputed organisation, a community gathering thousands of smart innovators and entrepreneurs, across Europe and beyond. Between 2017 & 2020, he was Head of the Secretariat of EUREKA, the inter-governmental Innovation Network developing publicly funded mechanisms (Eurostars-2, Eureka Clusters) helping SMEs to innovate & collaborate, to launch market-oriented R&D projects, and to grow internationally. He was instrumental in strengthening the partnership with the EC, through the Eurostars (SMEs cascade funding), the Invest-Horizon (Access to investors) programs, and the InnoWide (Access to overseas markets) pilot initiative. Philippe worked for Thésame Innovation in 2021 & 2022, an innovation agency based in the Auvergne Rhône-Alpes region, and between 2022 and 2022 for Wagralim (Walloon Agro-Food Cluster).
He was assigned and still acts as Expert by European & Int'l Institutions such as EC-DG Regio (Smart Specialization, Inter-regional Thematic Platforms), DG RTD (Horizon Europe), EIT (EIT-KICs), ESA (ESA-BICs), OECD (Support to SMEs), and the EIC (European Innovation Council). He was invited lecturer Hanken School of Economics in Helsinki (FIN), and acts as Professor & Advisory Board Member of Coventry University (UK). He founded EcoSystemiX in September 2020, an advisory company offering expertise and support to Innovation, Entrepreneurship and Innovation Ecosystems' players. One of his recent missions was to support the deployment of the D4DHub (Digital for Development) initiative (DG INTPA & 12 EU-Member States).