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.
“Ecosystem Navigators offer all the expertise, experience and energy to turn ecosystem policy and - navigation into a success”
Project Portfolio
A selection of initiatives in which the Ecosystem Navigators partners have contributed:
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 bronze label for cluster management excellence last year and is currently going for the silver label. 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.
DigiShape is an open innovation platform of companies, knowledge institutions and governments that together want to exploit the great potential of digitisation for the water sector. In recent years, the world has been digitising at a furious pace. By making smart use of data innovations and digitisation, the water sector can save costs, increase quality and reduce risks. Governments, the business community and knowledge institutes are therefore working hard to integrate data from various sources more intelligently into their business processes. The DigiShape members innovate as an open community with massive amounts of data and advanced techniques. Using data science and digitisation, they develop innovative solutions for the concrete challenges of today and tomorrow.
The AMS Institute is a young and ambitious international institute at the forefront of innovation, situated at the nexus between industry, government and academia. Engaging and developing the latest technology and science with research, experiments and projects in the city of Amsterdam, the institute takes on the challenges posed by our rapidly urbanizing world. The AMS institute is using the city of Amsterdam as a Living Lab in which multiple stakeholders jointly test, develop and create metropolitan solutions. Its mission is to develop a deep understanding of the city – sense the city – to design solutions for its challenges and integrate these into the city of Amsterdam. The AMS research portfolio revolves around applied technology in themes such as water, energy, waste, food, data and mobility, and integrating these themes to create an innovative, sustainable and just city. AMS Institute is involved in over 100 projects that focus on securing a city that is innovative, sustainable and just.
Global Partner Network
We have a vast global network of top-notch experts both in specific domains, ranging from innovation experts to economists.
Our partner network
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.