Yesterday, at 7AM I was drinking an Espresso in the city center of Düsseldorf. Only a 1,5 hour drive later I arrived at the High Tech Campus (HTC) in Eindoven, the home of PHILIPS, Signify, and dozens of other technology companies and startups.
This 90 minute drive felt like time traveling from the past into the present. The HTC greeted me with an infrastructure that reminded me of the Google Campus in Mountain View, California. The entire campus is designed car-free. Well not literally, because it has a direct access to the high way and offers generous free parking spaces in green car parks. From there you walk to your office or you can use bike sharing.
It is surrounded by areas of water, which is typical for the Netherlands. On the clean, car-free roads, you can see self-driving delivery robots, you overhear at least as many English conversations as you can overhear Dutch conversations. An international business atmosphere you don’t have – for example – in Düsseldorf.
The HTC in Eindhoven is not the future. The campus is already 25 years old. It is a reminder for city- and business park planners of how the present should look like. Overall, I feel that in the Netherlands you get a much better infrastructure for a comparable amount of taxes. The world can definetly learn from the Dutch.