March 2013 - now: Eric Thelen B.V.
Via Eric Thelen B.V., I am providing innovation consultancy support since March 2013.

November 2010 – February 2013: Philips Home Healthcare Solutions – Senior Director Strategic Projects and Business Development
The Philips Healthcare Business Group Philips Home Healthcare Solutions covers activities in Sleep and Respiratory Care, Personal Emergency Response Services and Remote Patient Monitoring. In a staff position reporting to two of the General Managers, I participated in several strategic initiatives and coordinated R&D activities.

September 2007 – October 2010: Philips Home Monitoring – Vice President and Chief Technology Officer
The Business Unit Home Monitoring is part of Philips Healthcare's Business Group Home Healthcare Solutions and covers activities in Personal Emergency Response Services and Remote Patient Monitoring. As Chief Technology Officer reporting to the General Manager, I was a member of the Management Committee and I was responsible for Research & Development, for the Quality & Regulatory function (FDA Class II Medical Device Manufacturer) and for Product Operations (Manufacturing, Order Management, Distribution, Supply Chain Management). My team launched a Cordless Phone product in 2009 and Lifeline with AutoAlert (fall detection solution) in 2010. We introduced a new FDA-compliant quality system and successfully passed an FDA audit. I was in charge of the transfer of all product operations activities from our Business Unit headquarters to the headquarters of the larger Business Group. Together with my teams, I created and implemented new innovation processes. I supported Mergers & Acquisitions activities and represented on the Board of Directors of Continua Health Alliance (focused on interoperability guidelines for the Connected Health ecosystem) during 2008.

October 2005 – September 2007: Philips Research – Vice President and Sector Head Digital Care Solutions (e-Health)
As Sector Head, I was responsible for four research departments in three countries (The Netherlands, Germany and India) and for the e-Health research focal area. Within my sector, a lab venture on pointing as user interaction technology, an incubator business on patient communication in hospitals and an incubator business on ICT-enhanced toys have been started.

January 2004 – September 2005: Philips Research – Department Head Medical Signal Processing
The Medical Signal Processing department focused on Personal Healthcare and on Medical Imaging. We started the EU project MyHeart. I led a deep dive study on implantable technologies that led to a new research program. I supported the initiation of a new Business Unit on Consumer Health and Wellness.

December 2000 – December 2003: Philips Research – Department Head Man-Machine Interfaces
The Man-Machine Interfaces department focused on Automatic Speech Recognition and related technologies. I had program management responsibility for the domain user-interface-enabling technologies. I supported the start of an incubator business on dialogue-based interaction with home equipment as well as the sale of two Philips speech recognition businesses.

October 1999 – November 2000: Philips Spin-out Project Spridge, Inc. – Founder & VP Operations
Spridge, Inc. was a Philips spin-out project focused on the Internet speech portal "mySpeech". Together with two other founding members, I initiated this start-up out of Philips Research. In the small team, I was mainly responsible for operations. We launched the world-wide first Internet speech portal and demonstrated it at the Comdex trade show in 1999. The term-sheet for our venture capital deal, which valued our start-up at $ 17.2M, was withdrawn when the market for Internet businesses took a hit in April 2000. We ultimately transferred the technology to a Philips Business Unit.

July 1994 – September 1999: Philips Research – Research Scientist Man-Machine Interfaces
During my time as a research scientist in the field of Automatic Speech Recognition, I worked on feature extraction techniques (reduced data rate for speech recognition features approx. by factor of 2) and on speaker adaptation algorithms (reduced error rate for specific speech recognition systems by more than 50%). I was project manager for speech recognition for large vocabulary medical report dictation and for speech recognition over the Internet. The latter project was selected for a business seed phase and the project team was transferred to California in early 1999.