Wikipedia
BrabantStad is a partnership between the municipalities of Breda, Eindhoven, Helmond, 's-Hertogenbosch and Tilburg and the province of North Brabant. The region has overlap with the Brabant metropolitan area and the Eindhoven metropolitan region and lies within the Eindhoven- Leuven- Aachen Triangle (ELAT). The partnership aims to form an urban network and to make Brabant explicitly known as a leading knowledge region within Europe. There is cooperation on economic, spatial, social and cultural areas. With a total of 1.5 million people and 20% of the industrial production in the Netherlands is BrabantStad one of the major economical important, metropolitan regions of the Netherlands.
The province of Noord-Brabant is one of the most innovative regions of the European Union. This is shown by the extensive amount of new research patents by Eurostat. In BrabantStad there are every year 2100 patent applications made at the European Patent Office (EPO), which is 900 per million active employees. Mainly due to the Dutch electronics giant Philips' scientific centers, BrabantStad has grown more important than similar centres like Paris, Stockholm and Stuttgart.
Of all the money that goes to research and development in the Netherlands, one third is spent in Eindhoven. The slogan of the city of Eindhoven, "Leading in technology", is based on this. A quarter of the jobs in the region are in technology and ICT. The largest expenses and most patent applications come from Eindhoven, mainly Philips. Of all European patent applications in the field of physics and electronics about eight per cent is from North Brabant.
Also DAF, VDL, Ciber, Atos Origin, NXP, ASML, FEI Company, Thales Cryognetics and TNO Industrial Technology are located in BrabantStad. The Eindhoven University of Technology hosts an incubator for technology startups (called the Twinning Center) and the NatLab has developed into the High Tech Campus Eindhoven.
This cooperative tradition has also developed into a different direction than the traditional technology research done at the university. Starting in 2002, Eindhoven University of Technology, the Catharina Hospital in Eindhoven, 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.
In the extended region, BrabantStad is part of the Eindhoven- Leuven- Aachen Triangle (ELAT). This economic cooperation agreement between three cities in three countries has created one of the most innovative regions in the European Union (measured in terms of money invested in technology and knowledge economy); the agreement is based on the cooperative triangle that connects the three technical universities in those cities.