Introduction

North Brabant is a province located in the south of the Netherlands, bordering Belgium. It is the third most populated province of the Netherlands, with 2.4 million inhabitants and home to several medium-sized cities such as Eindhoven, Breda and Tilburg. It is one of the more wealthy provinces in the country with an estimated GRP per capita of €35.665 in 2011 (ING 2011). This is lower than in the western provinces of the Netherlands, where cities such as Amsterdam and Rotterdam are located, but is higher than many other provinces in the Netherlands. It has a relatively low unemployment rate of 5.3 per cent (2010), and relatively high labour productivity and productivity growth.

North Brabant is the leading technological region of the Netherlands, and is also innovative in the European Union (EU) context, as illustrated by its prominent position in the EU Regional Innovation Scoreboard (Hollanders, Tarantola, and Loschky 2009). Within the region of North Brabant, the city-region of Eindhoven plays a particularly important role, as highlighted by recent comparative European studies on knowledge-based regions, typifying it as “star niche player” and ranking it eighth among Europe's smartest medium-sized cities (Fernandez-Maldonado and Romein 2010).

The leading innovative performance of North Brabant (and Eindhoven City-Region) can be illustrated by a variety of indicators, including hightech employment, patent applications, research and development (R&D) expenditure, as well as the number of leading firms and universities. Thus, North Brabant is the Dutch region with the highest share of hightech employment. It made up 5.3 per cent of the labour force in South Netherlands in 2006, more than twice the share of the more affluent West Netherlands, where it comprised 2.2 per cent of the labour force.

The number of patent applications coming from North Brabant is impressive. It has one of the highest scores with respect to patent applications per capita amongst OECD regions and by far the highest in the Netherlands (Figure 12.1). In several sectors, North Brabant is the leading region with respect to patents.