The four-year plan is dependent on the support of the government to the tune of 200 million euros. 100 million more is to come from the business community. TU/e will provide the last 100 million. According to Van Dam, this last-mentioned amount will not be at the cost of existing activities. The 400 million total costs will be spread over the four years, making the annual burden 100 million divided between the government, TU/e and the business community.

“We are sounding out cabinet ministers, and our first impression is that there is a lot of interest in this region”, says Van Dam. “We will be working out the details of the plan in the weeks ahead. Depending on the reactions we get from the government and the local business community, we should have a clearer picture of our chances of success soon.”

The plan focuses on four ‘action lines’. The first is for R&D staff losing their jobs in research, in which government, businesses and research institutes in this region are involved. Some of these people will be offered temporary research positions with TU/e - in existing programs or with new institutes currently being developed at this university. The second line of action is for people losing regular research jobs with companies. They will be temporarily outsourced to the university as ‘industrial fellows’ to work in education, research or valorization. A large group of people working in research in this region is foreign, e.g. at least half of Philips’ researchers are non-Dutch.

Profit
The third action line targets recent graduates and new PhDs who will be offered jobs as PhD candidates or post-docs, respectively. “Foreign Master students can also profit from this. We hope to be able to fill existing openings for PhD candidates more quickly than we do now. We usually have about 75 to 100 positions open that take about half a year to fill on average. We want to bring this down to three months in the future”, says Van Dam. In a fourth action line, recent graduates would be offered places as trainee technological designers.

Altogether one thousand new jobs are to be financed. In this way, TU/e hopes to play an important part in retaining important research staff for the Eindhoven region. The idea is that scientists should be able to return to their former jobs or move on to other jobs in the region when the recession lifts in a few years and companies are hiring again. “Actually, we hope to interest more Dutch graduates in research positions at the university than we have in the past years”, says Van Dam. “At the same time we also want to hold on to any international researchers who would like to stay on longer in the Netherlands.”/.

Foreign population TU/e (not including part-timers)