Born in 1956, August 21 in Sneek, Netherlands, he received his PhD Technical Sciences 1983 and his MSc Mechanical Engineering (Ir Werktuigbouwkunde) 1979 at the Eindhoven University of Technology.
Since 2004 managing director of TNO Industrie in Eindhoven, and from 2005 director Knowledge (CTO) of TNO Science and Industry, a 1000+ large R&D organisation.
Before joining TNO Egbert-Jan Sol was principle system architect at Ericsson. There we were shaping the future of broadband communication networks delivering 1000 times more price/performance for the same dollar a day people paid more then a century with Graham Bell on communication technology. This work is called Public Ethernet and uses a patented approach we developed in combination with programmable filtering bridges
Egbert-Jan Sol was vice president technology at Ericsson Telecommunicatie BV (ETM) at Rijen, Netherlands. Initially as R&D Manager, he became board member of ETM for technology with a focus on research & development, product marketing and strategic business development at Ericsson Telecommunication in the Netherlands. Initially part-time working for LM Ericsson at Corporate Technology in Stockholm/Kista and latter 2 year as expat, while living in Sweden, he was member of the Ericsson Technology Board and the Core System Management group.
Within the Dutch context Egbert-Jan Sol was member of the board the Telematica Instituut, the advisory council of TNO-FEL, and the SURF foundation, chairman of the Dutch Telecom research funding programs IOP Generic Communication (www.senter.nl) and the Towards Freeband Knowledge Impulse research program and member of the ICT-Forum of the Dutch government and the CELTIC Eureka initiative. Today he is active in the boards of DPI, NIMR, CITT, Be-linked, the SRE steering group and a few more
From 1999-2002 he wrote a monthly column in the large Dutch IT weekly magazine “Computable” and some anonymous public Ericsson whitepapers. Two short versions appeared in the Dutch in the Telecommagazine (sept 2000, nov 2002). He also contributed to the “Ambient Intelligent” paper of the ISTAG commission of the EC (2000) and the ambition formulation around the 4G ambient Internet in the lePair commission of the Dutch government.
Before joining Ericsson he was been software manager at Philips Industrial Electronics (PLC, Real-time Unix), latter he was consultant at BSO-AT/Origin for several large industrial firms in the area of IT-management, embedded software development and data-communication. Finally he was marketing and sales manager at Philips/Origin for Internet services. After his PhD he started to work for Hoogovens Automation Systems as project manager for robotic and industrial automation projects.
From 1990-1998 Egbert-Jan Sol has been part-time professor at the Eindhoven University of Technology at Technology Management. Research topics at the university were architectures and the management of product development
Beside winner of the academy award of the university in the category teacher in 1996 for his experiments with lectures on the Internet, Egbert-Jan Sol is co-founder and first chairman of the Digital City Eindhoven (Digitale Stad Eindhoven) with this web page: http://www.dse.nl/~ejsol.
'It's easy to make something complex, it is very difficult to make something simple. Only the most simple solution works, but what is simple and what is complexity. Why don't we have a formula for expressing a rate of complexity or simplicity". With the telephone system being the most complex man-made system and Ethernet is so stupid simple it is great fun to how “Ethernet always wins”. What is left over is for his family and reading magazines on developments in business, new technology and complexity theories.
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