“Bringing societal value with meaningful innovations requires collaboration between organisations and individuals with very different value systems. So we bring together interdisciplinary teams to make many dreams come true.”

Elke den Ouden is TU/e Fellow in the Innovation, Technology Entrepreneurship & Marketing group of the department Industrial Engineering & Innovation Sciences. Her research focuses on new business development in public-private value networks, in particular intelligent lighting and smart city innovations. Since its early days, she has been involved in the TU/e Intelligent Lighting Institute (ILI) and is responsible for the strategy on Living Light Labs. She is also an ambassador of TU/e innovation Space, where interdisciplinary student teams work on complex societal and industrial challenges. She
combines her extensive industrial experience with academic research in innovation in ecosystems, in which students play an essential role.

Elke den Ouden obtained her master’s degree in Industrial Design Engineering at the Delft University of Technology. She subsequently joined Philips, where she has held several positions as advisor and  manager in product innovation for more than 20 years. In 2000 she joined TU/e, where she obtained her PhD in Technology Management from TU/e in 2006 and became a part-time professor in the Department of Industrial Design in 2008. In 2014 she was appointed as TU/e Fellow.
She is the author of the book ‘Innovation Design – Creating Value for People, Organisations and Society’, published by Springer Science + Business and many other academic and practitioner-oriented publications.