Janke Dittmer (pictured), one of the first employees of Netherlands-based healthcare company Royal Philips Electronics’ corporate venturing incubator, has joined local private equity firm Gilde as a partner.
The move follows Philips providing the cornerstone commitment to the planned €200m ($250m) Gilde Healthcare Partners fund in August last year.
As one of the fund’s anchor investors, Philips said Gilde’s management would be independent of the Dutch consumer goods group but it had contributed to shaping part of the fund’s scope to invest in patient-centric healthcare, such as home healthcare, sleep improvement techniques, image-guided interventions/therapies and clinical decision support, with particular emphasis on cardiology, oncology and women’s health.
Transferring Dittmer, therefore, is a way to provide the human capital to help Gilde understand Philips’s needs and strategy and a link back to the cornerstone investor.
A similar strategy has been followed by UK-listed consumer goods maker Unilever when it helped cornerstone Physic Ventures in the US and Langholm Capital in Europe by seconding Phil Giesler and Richard Lagnado to the investment firms, respectively.
Dittmer had spent more than 3.5 years as chief executive of the Philips Healthcare Incubator, having previously been responsible for starting the corporate venturing organization in Spring 2006. The incubator, one of three at Philips, now has about 130 people working on new internal and externally-derived innovations round the world.
Previously, Dittmer, who declined to comment, was a consultant at McKinsey for four years and co-founder of clean-tech company NanoSolar, which is slated for a fundraising and/or flotation in the next few years.