Patrick Wouters

Patrick is a seasoned professional with over 35 years of experience in Grants and Incentives for Innovation, Public Affairs & Funding, Business Administration, Innovation Management, (R&D) Project Management, People Management, Quality and Risk Management, and R&D&I Consultancy.

Patrick started his career as a scientific associate with various scientific and academic assignments. After obtaining a PhD at the KU Leuven in 1995, he held several R&D managing positions in semiconductor and telecommunication domains at Alcatel Microelectronics. He joined STMicroelectronics in 2002 as a business development manager, and shortly after as corporate partnerships and public affairs manager. From 2009 to 2013 he was a senior manager at the joint ventures ST-NXP Wireless and ST-Ericsson, responsible for worldwide cooperative R&D programs, partnerships and grants, with specific focus on R&D for advanced integrated circuits and embedded systems for mobile, wireless and sensor-based applications (e.g., Body Area Networks, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS/Galileo, UWB, 2G/3G/4G).

During this period, he (co-)authored and contributed to multiple regional, national and European (FP6, FP7, Horizon 2020, Eureka, Eureka Clusters [MEDEA(+), Catrene, ITEA(x)], and Joint Undertakings [ARTEMIS, ENIAC, ECSEL], Horizon 2020) grant applications, and coordinated several funded R&D&I projects.

He published more than 30 papers in international journals and conference proceedings on biomedical, low-power and telecommunications mixed-signal Integrated Circuit and System-on-Chip design, and holds several patents in the field of analog, low-power and telecommunication circuits and systems.

Over the last decade he has been active in innovation consultancy, as senior manager and director at EY, in the field of national and European grants and incentives for R&D&I projects, with responsibilities in sales and marketing, team and project coordination, business roadmaps, quality and methodology management, elaboration of grant applications, and associated project management. He specifically focused on coaching and guiding start-up and scale-up companies regarding public (VLAIO, Innoviris, Eureka, Eurostars, SME Instrument, EIC Accelerator, Horizon 2020, Horizon Europe) and private funding, consortium building, business plans, R&D&I roadmap, and go to market strategy.