TALKS & DEMOS
4 thematic tracks for cross-market insights
TALKS & DEMOS
4 thematic tracks for cross-sector insights
From cybersecurity and sustainability to AI adoption and talent shortages, today’s biggest business challenges cross market lines. Luckily, the solutions do too! Join fellow innovators, entrepreneurs, and industry leaders on November 24th at our Kruibeke innovation center to get inspired by cross-market breakthroughs. Explore the full presentation line up below and select the 2 tracks that align best with your interests upon registration to customize your experience.
Event program
09:00 • Registration & morning coffee
09:30 • Welcome by Koen Verhaert
10:00 • A track of your choice
12:15 • Lunch
13:45 • A track of your choice
16:00 • Wrap-up
16:15 • Reception
FMCG & consumer
Technology, innovation and the changing consumer ➜
Industry
Raising the bar for industrial performance ➜
Life sciences
Space & defense
THEME INTRODUCTION
Open innovation 4.0
The era of isolated R&D is over. To close the productivity gap with the US and China, Europe must radically boost the productivity of innovation itself. Because the world’s biggest challenges can’t be solved by single products, systems or services, they demand complementary solutions that span entire value chains. This keynote redefines open innovation: moving away from outdated, centralized ‘spider webs’ to agile, interconnected ‘neural networks’. Discover how cross-market ecosystems solve complex end-user needs, maximize impact in markets that matter, and turn multi-domain collaboration into Europe’s greatest competitive engine.
Koen Verhaert
CEO at Verhaert Master in Innovation
TRACK 1 • FMCG & CONSUMER
Technology, innovation and the changing consumer
Consumers increasingly expect products that align with their values, from sustainability to better experiences. For FMCG companies, responding to these expectations calls for innovation that goes beyond new flavors, formats and packaging. This track looks at how technology can open new possibilities and how to make those possibilities work in practice through innovation acceleration and risk management. Explore innovation pilots, advanced sensing, data and IoT-enabled insights, and the approaches that help turn emerging technology into lasting consumer value.
Jan Willem Dik
Managing Director
at BEACON Verhaert Nederland
01
Standing out on the shelf with rapid and real-world testing
In crowded consumer markets, standing out takes more than just basic features or entering a race to the bottom on price. To win, brands must deliver premium, memorable experiences that keep customers coming back. This session breaks down how innovation pilots help you to protect your competitive edge and unlock new revenue streams. By combining advanced market analytics with functional pilots, you can quickly learn what works, refine your proposition and make better-informed decisions before taking the next step.
Runeke Lievens
Customer Success Manager
at Verhaert Strategic Innovation
02
Using advanced sensing to rethink FMCG products
Advanced sensing technologies are opening up new possibilities for FMCG products, particularly around safety, health and quality. Instead of adding more consumer-facing features, companies can use sensing capabilities to improve how products are developed and how they perform. This deep dive explores how technology transfer from other industries can accelerate this type of product innovation and help FMCG companies create differentiated products without simply adding complexity or features.
03
Turning industrial technology into consumer value
Industrial environments use edge computing, machine vision and advanced sensing to make critical decisions in milliseconds. Bringing these capabilities into consumer appliances opens up a new generation of connected experiences, from detecting food that is about to expire to processing sensitive behavioral data without sending it to the cloud. In this presentation, you’ll discover how FMCG brands can repurpose proven industrial technologies to make the home smarter, more sustainable and more private.
Sanne van Loenen
Backend Developer
at Verhaert Digital Innovation
TRACK 2 • INDUSTRY
Raising the bar for industrial performance
Industrial companies are under pressure to produce more efficiently while reducing their environmental footprint, often within complex and regulated environments shaped by legacy systems. Meeting both ambitions requires innovation across the entire value chain. This track explores how smart technologies can unlock new ways of working and creating value, from servitization and autonomous mobility to advanced metrology. Discover how smart industry can help you drive meaningful change beyond traditional R&D.
Joris De Lamper
Business Unit Director
at Verhaert Digital Innovation
01
Monetizing SaaS and paywalls without falling into the service paradox
Shifting from one-off equipment sales to performance-based business models opens the door to predictable revenues and deeper customer intimacy. However, machine builders often stumble into the ‘service paradox’, where investing more fails to yield higher profits. So how can you monetize digital features so they turn connected machinery into reliable, recurring business value? This session explores how to successfully transition from CapEx to OpEx without draining cash flow by bridging the capability gap in IoT sensors and sales culture.
Dany Robberecht
Business Unit Director
at Verhaert Strategic Innovation
02
De-risking industrial operations with consumer-grade UX
Industrial control rooms are becoming increasingly complex, with operators expected to process large amounts of information while making critical decisions. This deep dive explores how approaches from consumer UX, where interfaces are continuously tested and refined to remove friction, can be adapted to industrial environments. Discover how context-aware dashboards reduce cognitive load, guide operators through complex procedures and support safer and more effective decision-making.
Dennis Daems & Tom Hendrickx
Technical Analyst & UX/UI Designer
at Verhaert Digital Innovation
03
Measuring the next industrial breakthrough in product development
Zero-defect production and next-generation technologies demand an unprecedented level of precision. Advanced metrology makes it possible to see, measure and understand what is happening at the micrometer and nanometer scale. This deep dive explores how new measurement technologies generate insights that can improve industrial processes, uncover hidden opportunities and enable breakthroughs in product development. Because sometimes, the key to making something better starts with being able to measure it differently.
Olivier Fontaine
BDM (Life Sciences) at Lambda-X
Verhaert High-Tech Innovation
TRACK 3 • LIFE SCIENCES
Breaking the silos of healthcare innovation
Personalized healthcare promises more precise, preventive and predictable care, but turning that ambition into reality means overcoming regulatory, cost, technology and data challenges. It also requires looking beyond individual organizations and connecting solutions across the patient journey. This track explores how cross-domain innovation can help bridge those gaps, with practical examples ranging from expert systems and wearables to continuous freeze-drying and technologies transferred from space to advance life sciences.
Thomas Degreef
System / R&D Engineer
at Verhaert Product Innovation
01
Moving from one-size-fits-all to results-driven healthcare
Moving toward outcome-oriented healthcare requires more than new technologies. The combination of high development costs, organizational resistance and disconnected innovation processes often stands in the way of making meaningful change possible. In this talk, we outline a clear path to align disconnected technologies with real-world needs. We’ll help you explore how to leverage evidence-based user research and operational validation pilots to create applications patients love and providers trust.
David Pas
Customer Success Manager
at Verhaert Strategic Innovation
02
Rethinking freeze-drying for scalable manufacturing
For high-value, low-volume medicines, manufacturing processes need to be both precise and adaptable. Continuous freeze-drying rethinks the conventional batch approach by integrating controlled freezing and infrared heating into a single automated and sterile production line. This deep dive explores how the Rheavita technology can cut freeze-drying cycles from days to hours while improving product consistency and scalability, helping manufacturers respond more efficiently to the growing complexity of modern biopharmaceutical production.
Karl Wyseur
Mechanical Design Engineer
at Verhaert On-site Consulting
Revealing the invisible: Shedding new light on biology
Many of the most important biological processes happen beyond what the human eye can see. To reveal chemical composition, cellular structures and activity at unprecedented levels of detail, advanced instrumentation combines spectroscopy, Raman analysis and 3D cell imaging. This deep dive explores how these technologies turn previously invisible processes into measurable data, giving researchers new ways to understand living systems and creating opportunities to improve diagnostics, research and the development of future therapies.
Miza Cognart
BDM (Life Sciences) at Lambda-X
Verhaert High-Tech Innovation
TRACK 4 • SPACE & DEFENSE
How dual-use tech is redefining innovation capabilities
Building future-ready space and defense capabilities requires more than developing new technologies. It means connecting innovators, technologies and operational needs across a diverse ecosystem, and finding ways to scale solutions in a demanding environment. In this track, you dive into dual-use innovation, turning ideas from different domains into practical capabilities. Find out about examples of innovation accelerators, technology transfer and swarming approaches.
Thierry Dupont
Strategic Advisor Defense Innovation
at Verhaert Masters in Innovation
01
Start-up ecosystems and tech transfer for dual-use innovation
Europe needs to strengthen its competitiveness and strategic sovereignty. Fortunately, frontier technologies developed through publicly funded projects and deep-tech start-ups represent a largely untapped opportunity. This talk explores how sourcing innovations at their origin, particularly from the space industry, can speed up the development of public safety and defense solutions. A critical priority in the times we live in.
Vittorio Bava
Innovation Consultant
at Verhaert Strategic Innovation
02
Built for the extremes: Engineering next-gen SDA solutions
As demand for space domain awareness grows, missions require payloads that can perform reliably in increasingly demanding environments. This deep dive explores how proven, high-TRL building blocks and end-to-end optics expertise can reduce technical risk, from early design through integration and testing. Discover how combining deep-space heritage with a flexible co-engineering approach can help defense primes develop, qualify and deploy custom optomechanical payloads for complex missions.
Jean-Luc Dewandel
Business Line Officer (Space & Defense)
at Lambda-X Verhaert High-Tech Innovation
03
From swarm intelligence to connected products
What if many smaller systems could outperform one large system? Inspired by the principle of swarming, autonomous connected products can create safer, more resilient and fail-safe capabilities at a fraction of the cost. This deep dive explores how the inherent advantages of swarming can be practically realized and translated into space and defense applications. With physical AI enabling individual products to sense, decide and act locally in real-time, discover how this approach could reshape the capabilities for multi-domain operations.
Rudy Van Raemdonck
Coordinator Embedded Systems
at Verhaert Product Innovation
Secure your spot
Get exclusive access to our latest breakthroughs and experience firsthand our journey in navigating the crossroads of change.
Secure your spot
Get exclusive access to our latest breakthroughs and experience firsthand our journey in navigating the crossroads of change.
The Innovation Day is organized by Verhaert Masters in Innovation, a leading European innovation service provider, boosting your capacity to innovate.