Latest blog articles

A while ago, I discussed the requirements that subsidy providers have set regarding intellectual property... This blog is only available in Dutch.

In the past few days, we’ve commemorated the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II. Seventy years! We used to call that a lifetime. While most of us were born after the war, that same war has affected our lives in one way or another, even though we may not realise it.

Knowing what atrocities...

House of Representatives’ member Pieter Duisenberg from the People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD) has proposed to stimulate academic promotions from industrial research. The Confederation of Netherlands Industry and Employers (VNO-NCW) and the association of Dutch SMEs (MKB-Nederland)...

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about my grandfather. Exactly one hundred years ago, at the age of fourteen, he went to work in a metal factory. There were ten children at home, none with more than a primary school education. For fifty years he worked to the bone, for reasons that included being...

As bills don’t pay themselves an income is required, some obtain it by working for a wage, others by starting up their own business and some are so talented that they can make an income out of their hobby. In the Weekly column ‘My Way to Make Money’ we interview a student or a university employee...

Christmas markets in the region were hard to miss in December. The one in Maastricht, called ‘Magisch Maastricht’, was on my way home from work, so I both literally and figuratively couldn’t miss it. As in previous years, I often heard more German than Dutch voices—an indicator of the popularity of...

Ton Wilthagen recently argued that universities should bring their knowledge to the market more convincingly... This blog is only available in Dutch.

In communications the medium is the message. Don’t mail if you can call. Don’t call if you can visit. That is my motto, also in 2015. Of course you can wish your friends a happy New Year via a post on Facebook or LinkedIn, a 140 character Tweet, or by sending an e-mail to all your relations. Some...

‘Everything valuable is vulnerable’, wrote one of the greatest Dutch poets, Lucebert, in 1974. Coincidentally, this was also the year that the first fifty students started the medicine programme in Maastricht, even before the official approval from The Hague (the Rijksuniversiteit Limburg was only...

Do you remember where you were on 9 November 1989? Tomorrow is the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall—a crucial moment in the German and European history of the twentieth century.