About us
Partners
The founders of Ecosystem Navigators have dedicated much of their careers to building, managing, and shaping alliances, clusters, and innovation ecosystems, bringing a wealth of hands-on experience. With access to a global network of leading experts – from innovation specialists to economists – we deliver tailor-made solutions based on proven methods and tools, executed by experienced professionals.
Roger van Hoesel
Co-founder& Partner
Bringing vision and collaboration to tangible results
Roger van Hoesel focuses on strengthening ecosystems where companies, knowledge institutions, and governments collaborate around innovation and economic development. His expertise lies in creating sustainable partnerships that combine societal and economic impact.
As former director of Foodvalley NL, he was for over fifteen years the face of the Dutch innovation cluster for food and agriculture. There, he helped build an internationally leading network that connects entrepreneurship, research, and policy. Today, he applies his experience as director of Logistics Valley in the Nijmegen region, connecting businesses, education, and government to make the logistics sector future-proof and sustainable.
Roger combines strategic insight with the ability to align diverse interests and drive them forward. He operates from trust, horizontal collaboration, and shared responsibility. With his pragmatic approach, he turns vision into tangible results.
He played a key role in positioning Foodvalley as an international brand, initiated numerous public-private projects, and brought stakeholders together around themes such as zero-emission transport, talent development, and supply chain innovation.
His conviction: sustainable progress emerges when people from different perspectives work together towards shared goals—and that is exactly what drives him.
Chris Karman
Co-founder & Partner
Connecting people, knowledge, and systems into functioning ecosystems
Chris Karman focuses on building strong collaborative networks around societal and technological challenges. His expertise lies in developing and guiding innovation ecosystems where companies, knowledge institutions, and governments work together towards shared ambitions.
As co-founder of Ecosystem Navigators, he supports consortia, programmes, and regions in translating vision into action, always emphasizing ownership, structure, and interconnections. Chris combines strategic insight with process-driven execution, making complex collaborations practically workable.
He played a key role in establishing the Maritime Campus Netherlands and developing the AMS Institute in Amsterdam. He also brought DigiShape from concept to success—an open innovation community for digitalization in the water sector. Additionally, he helped build the campus organization at the core of the high-tech supply chain (Brainport Industries Campus) and contributed to strengthening the agrifood innovation cluster within Foodvalley.
Currently, Chris works among other roles as programme leader of the sector-wide Maritime Human Capital programme, helping shape collaboration across industries and between education and business.
His conviction: innovation truly thrives only within a context of engagement, shared purpose, and joint action. This is exactly what he contributes to every day.
Huiberdien Sweeris
Partner
Building bridges between people, organizations, and ideas
Huiberdien Sweeris works on programmes that create impact in water, food, agriculture, and talent development. She focuses on fostering collaborations between public and private stakeholders that aim to tackle societal challenges and actually bring them to fruition.
As a partner at Ecosystem Navigators, she helps organizations translate a shared vision into actionable programmes, build ecosystems, and bridge policy and practice. With experience in startups, network organizations, and knowledge institutions, Huiberdien brings a broad perspective and strong execution skills. She moves seamlessly between strategy and implementation, making complex projects clear and workable for all stakeholders, with attention to pace, support, and results. Her work is always aimed at sustainably strengthening collaboration and creating meaningful momentum.
Huiberdien has hands-on experience in establishing partnerships and implementing jointly supported programmes. She played an important role in initiatives such as FoodX, contributing to operational execution and organizing inbound international visits with attention to the interests of Dutch innovative agrifood partners. For YEPProgrammes, she guided the programme from concept to execution, enabling young professionals to gain international work experience.
Her conviction: collaboration only has value when shared ambitions lead to visible results—and that is exactly what she works on every day.
Project Portfolio
A selection of initiatives shaped together with the partners of Ecosystem Navigators:
aBi Development is committed to fostering green and inclusive growth in Uganda’s agriculture sector by empowering smallholder farmers and rural agri-entrepreneurs. Through targeted interventions in finance, technical support, and capacity building, aBi has transformed livelihoods, enabling communities to achieve sustainable development and resilience. By introducing a cluster approach, aBi aims at getting long standing commitment of various stakeholders to solve common challenges in the value chains in Uganda. Ecosystem Navigators has been supportive in introducing the cluster concept and has offered guidance in the first stages of actually implementing cluster organizations.
The maritime sector is facing a major sustainability transition. At the same time, like many other (technical) sectors, it is struggling with an aging population and finding sufficient and suitable personnel. In order to meet this major challenge, the Netherlands Maritime Land has drawn up a vision and strategy with its members, all branches and large companies in the sector.
Together with the members, we have translated this vision into a supported program with concrete goals, actions and projects. Important here is the support, commitment and cooperation from the broad field of organizations (businesses large and small, education, research and government).
As part of the Maritime Master Plan, a growth fund program, we are anchoring this strategy in a learning community in which all Dutch maritime education works closely together with the maritime business community to work towards zero emissions in 2030.
Roger was the first CEO of Foodvalley NL until 2020. Since its establishment in 2004, Foodvalley has developed into one of the leading food ecosystem organisations in the world. The organisation is known for its demand driven, innovative way of working and its vast national and international network of food innovators. Over the years, it has attracted substantial international attention – both from overseas companies interested in participating in the ecosystems and by organisations keen on building a similar organisation. As Foodvalley’s CEO, Roger has been responsible for designing the organisation, including the business model, membership base and account management with partners in the Netherlands and abroad. Over the years, the organisations was reshaped a couple of time in order to cater for the changing needs of the companies that Foodvalley NL serves.
With the support of the Dutch government, together with Berytech, a greenfield cluster organisation was built in Lebanon, one of the first in the Middle-East. Qoot is now a generally recognised food cluster that acquired the silver label for cluster management excellence. The support provided began with the organisation of workshops on ecosystems and what ambition was realistic and achievable in this case. After this, different stakeholders formed a ‘coalition of the willing’. Subsequently, it concerned all aspects of the design of such an organisation (target group formulation, the development of service packages, financing models, governance, etc.) up to and including the co-selection of the cluster manager and the coaching of this person.
In 2022 Keukenhof launched the Entrepreneurs in the Lead program, especially for growers, traders and other entrepreneurs in the flower bulb and ornamental horticulture sector. The initiative arose after signals from the sector: there was a need for support in innovation projects and future-oriented developments.
The sector is facing major challenges and it is precisely the frontrunners who want to innovate, while the daily work continues as usual. Thus was born Entrepreneurs in the Lead: a program where entrepreneurs work together on solutions while all the (administrative) hassle is taken off your hands. In addition, the program acts as a platform for collaboration and knowledge sharing, aimed at a future-proof sector. More than 350 companies and organizations are now affiliated. At least four meetings are organized each year in which ongoing projects are discussed and new ideas take shape.
For Cluster Menara in Morocco, we designed and delivered a comprehensive training and capacity-building programme. The aim: to strengthen their cluster organization and accelerate innovation and collaboration. Through a series of online sessions, we addressed topics such as business models, examples of Dutch and international clusters, and approaches to stimulate the adoption of new technologies. In addition, we organized an inspiration and study visit to the Netherlands, giving Cluster Menara representatives first-hand insights into Dutch cluster collaboration and innovation support.
DigiShape is an open innovation platform uniting companies, knowledge institutions, and governments to unlock the vast potential of digitalization for the water sector.
The rapid digital transition of recent years offers major opportunities: smarter use of data and digital technologies can reduce costs, improve quality, and minimize risks.
Within DigiShape, public authorities, businesses, and research partners work closely together to intelligently integrate data from diverse sources into their processes. As an open community, members harness vast amounts of data and advanced techniques to develop innovative solutions through data science and digitalization—tackling the challenges of today and tomorrow.
The AMS Institute is a young and ambitious international institute at the forefront of innovation, operating at the intersection of business, government, and academia.
Through research, experiments, and projects in the city of Amsterdam, the institute leverages the latest technology and science to address the challenges of a rapidly urbanizing world.
Amsterdam serves as a Living Lab, where multiple stakeholders jointly test, develop, and implement solutions. The mission of AMS is to build a deep understanding of the city—to sense the city—in order to design solutions and directly integrate them into practice.
The research portfolio covers applied technology in areas such as water, energy, waste, food, data, and mobility. By connecting these themes, AMS works towards creating an innovative, sustainable, and just city. Today, the institute is involved in more than 100 projects contributing to this mission.
The Brainport Industries Campus (BIC) is the strategic growth location of and for the High Tech manufacturing industry. An internationally uniquely positioned campus of 200 ha, located in the green Brainport park Eindhoven. BIC is the place where the innovation and competitiveness of the high-tech manufacturing industry is strengthened through cooperation.
Commissioned by the founding partners (SdK Vastgoed, Gemeente Eindhoven and Provincie Noord-Brabant), we laid the foundation for the campus development organization. This creates and monitors the concept value of BIC, facilitates strategic challenges such as sustainability, mobility, circularity and energy supply, and ensures national international positioning.
The Young Expert Programmes (YEP) were developed in a public-private partnership between the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Dutch water sector. Our role: designing and implementing the programme, which trains and supports young professionals in international projects in water, agrofood, and sustainable development. By bringing together knowledge institutes, companies, and governments, YEP offers a unique springboard for young talent while strengthening the international position of the Netherlands. Since its inception, more than 600 Young Experts have participated across over 150 organizations worldwide.
Global Partner Network
We have a vast global network of top-notch experts both in specific domains, ranging from innovation experts to economists.
Adam Lyle
Regional lead Asia
Adam has combined a career in management consulting, change management and training with a passion for sustainable, purpose-driven business. He has worked with the private and public sectors to challenge and stimulate the way they develop and roll out strategy, including how they approach innovation in the creation and deployment of the products and services.
Adam is a Co-Founder and Executive Chairman of Padang & Co (Singapore). He believes that enabling vibrant partnerships between Enterprise and Startups is a key pillar of the Future of Work and will drive a new wave of innovation and resilient ecosystems. This led Padang & Co to develop world-leading capabilities in enabling Enterprises seek to get closer and innovate faster with Startups, other Enterprise and Government partners.
Paulo Silveira
Regional lead Latin America
Paulo is a food engineer with an extensive career in the private sector. He led many companies as CEO, amongst which Danisco Ingredients South America.
Paulo is CEO and founder of FoodTechHub Brasil. FoodTechHub Br (Sao Paulo) stands for cutting edge innovation, knowledge and entrepreneurship. Created in 2018, FoodTech Hub Br helps companies identifying relevant sources of science-tech knowledge, support and partnerships.
FoodTech Hub Br is the leading ecosystem in Latin America and has a panoramic view of food industry developments, thanks to the expertise of its food system leaders and the of innovation communities.
Rob Trice
Regional lead North America
Rob Trice is the Founder of The Mixing Bowl. In 2013, he began to leverage his background in telecom, mobile and internet venture capital to the application of information technology to the food and agriculture sectors. He is also the Founder of Better Food Ventures, making seed-stage investments aligned with the theme of applying IT to the food and agriculture industries. Rob previously worked at Swisscom Ventures, SK Telecom Ventures, Nokia Growth Partners and Nokia Venture Partners (now BlueRun Ventures). Prior to his days in venture capital work, he was at DIRECTV in LA and at a think-tank in DC, the Center for Strategic & International Studies. He also founded the non-profit Corporate Innovators Huddle and serves on the board of San Francisco-based engaged philanthropy organization, Full Circle Fund. He splits his time between Menlo Park and Pescadero, CA.