Fe+male Tech Heroes role model profile #60: Elly Zwartkruis: ‘Don’t wait for somebody to tell you to improve. Seize the opportunity.’
Ask Elly Zwartkruis how she ended up running the ChipNL Competence Centre, one of Europe’s most important technology networks, and she doesn’t start with an org chart. She starts from a more curious nature.
The psychologist who went back for the engineering
Elly studied economic psychology at Tilburg University, drawn to a simple question: what triggers people’s decision making? Why do people respond to things the way they do?
Take advertisements. “Why do they move people? What makes some products more successful than others, even if the only difference is branding? What is behind it? I was always very inspired by that.”
Elly joined Philips as a psychologist in the middle of digital television innovation. Then she hit a wall. “I found myself stuck, because I was lacking this technology background,” she said. After a couple of years into the job, she enrolled at TU Eindhoven to study User System Interaction and to learn the language of engineering herself.
“That really helped me bridge those worlds,” Elly says.
The pairing became the foundation of a nearly twenty-year career at Philips. In front-end innovation, her job was to read a market need, pull the right technical expertise and building blocks together into a concept and, with her team, hand the finished idea to the business to commercialize.
She realizes now she was in the right position at the right time. “The expertise at Philips Research was really world class. Now that I’m outside Philips, I can see how valuable it really was to work with such a community of experts within this innovative and collaborative culture,” she says.
An early role model
Elly doesn’t hesitate when asked about early role models at Philips Research. “Many people in the company have inspired me, and I was lucky enough to have been able to work with outstanding leaders from whom I learned a lot,” she says. “I had a manager at Philips who was exceptional. He was, in a way, safeguarding his team but also giving us the trust that we would succeed.” That trust made her more comfortable in taking calculated risks, doing things, as she puts it, “that you would not otherwise have even tried.”
He also strongly focused on building his team, so they were able to build on and learn from each other, in addition to the mechanics of getting things done inside a large organization, the “tips and tricks,” as she calls them.
This collaborative mindset now continues outside of Philips, where she finds many like-minded and even some of her former colleagues that have spread into semiconductor companies. “It is very nice to be able to build on such an extensive, knowledgeable and trusted network,” she says.
In charge at ChipNL CC
Today Elly is Managing Director of the ChipNL Competence Centre, the Dutch one-stop-shop in a European network built to support startups, scale-ups and SMEs in the semiconductor supply chain to strengthen the position of Europe.
The mission is to connect startups, scale-ups and SMEs to the technology, facilities, funding and expertise they need to succeed and to connect them to the European Pilot Lines and Design Platform. These are state-of-the-art facilities that can provide the most advanced tools and services to bring ideas from lab to fab.
Her team works in two ways: They support customers with a clear need and connect them to the right partner. For example, support funding opportunities, business development support and chip design expertise. In addition, they also proactively identify new opportunities to strengthen the value chain, where they bring together initiatives that can build innovative solutions for tomorrow’s industrial challenges.
She has no doubt about what’s at stake
“Our way of working and our way of living is radically going to change due to AI. We’re really at the forefront of a new era, and we can hardly grasp the impact it’s going to have.”
“Our way of working and our way of living is radically going to change due to AI,” Elly says. “We’re really at the forefront of a new era, and we can hardly grasp the impact it’s going to have.” she says.
“One of the key enablers is semiconductors. The potential is huge and global investments are skyrocketing. Europe cannot afford to miss out on this opportunity, and we have strong assets already in the global supply chain as well as innovative breakthroughs that will shape our future,” says Elly. “These initiatives need to be accelerated and this is exactly what we are committed to do at ChipNL Competence Centre.”
Closing the gap
Which brings her to a paradox in the technology capital of the Netherlands.
“We see an increasing demand for talent. The number of employees working in the semiconductor sector is expected to grow from roughly 53,000 employees in 2025 to 89,000 in 2030,” Elly says. “And we see especially an opportunity in attracting more women in the sector, not only by stimulating the choice for STEM education, but also by landing this talent pool in the sector.”
That includes expat women, who arrive in the Netherlands because of their partner’s job and are also often highly technically educated themselves. They represent a great opportunity. ChipNL CC works together with the national Operation Beethoven program, PhotonDelta and QDNL, on such talent attraction and retention programs, as well as on aligning the capability needs to educational programs, public and private.
It’s a gap she’s been chipping away at since her Philips days when she gave talks about technology to young girls. Her motivation hasn’t changed. “If you find a way to improve and shape your future, then do it,” she says. “Don’t wait for somebody to tell you to do so but seize the opportunity when you can.”
Two decades on, Elly is still delivering that message, just to a much bigger audience.
