Career in The Netherlands
Pieper returned to the Netherlands in 1998. For one year he was board member of the Dutch electronics giant Philips by invitation of Cor Boonstra, then Philips' president. This involvement ended abruptly in May 1999 when Pieper got involved in the claimed coding technology of Jan Sloot, a connection Pieper made on behalf of Philips. Philips officially decided not to use the technology. Pieper then decided to support the invention as a private investor and later also as board member, though Sloot's technology was often misunderstood as a compression technology, which led to erroneous articles such as one that claimed such huge compression is mathematically impossible. The inventor died of a heart attack shortly after he demonstrated his technology to a group of 20 investors and technology companies in the summer of 1999. After one year, Pieper ended his employment at Philips with a severance package of undisclosed value.
In 1998, together with ex-minister of economy Hans Wijers, Pieper set up Twinning, an incubator for starting entrepreneurs, particularly in the IT and especially the Internet sector. The project received ninety Million Guilders of government subsidy, and as the Dot-com bubble burst, the ministry decided to sell Twinning to a group of private investors. Of the fifty companies that Twinning started, more than 35 are still operating and some very successfully.
Pieper also independently took part in more than 30 IT businesses all as investor and or adviser. On 1 September 1999 Pieper was appointed as a professor of Electronic Commerce, a newly created chair at the faculty of informatics and technology management of the University of Twente. Pieper remains as a professor of business administration and corporate governance at the university of Twente.
At the end of 1999, Pieper founded Insight Capital Partners Europe, a private investment fund for IT-businesses, later operating under the name of Favonius Ventures, particularly in the field of e-commerce. In November 2000 he became Chairman of the Board of Lernout & Hauspie, a Flemish company specializing in speech recognition technology. Pieper was instrumental in uncovering a financial scandal at this company, which took place in the period 1996-1999, before he joined the company. In cooperation with the Belgian authorities, Pieper helped to secure information that ultimately led to the formal charging of the founders Jo Lernout and Pol Hauspie. Pieper left as Chairman of the board after the shareholders decided to appoint a new CEO and board.
In 2001, Pieper entered into the board of advisors of Nearshore IT services company, Levi9 Global Sourcing and conducted a study requested by minister Tineke Netelenbos for setting up a system for road pricing, called Mobimiles. Later that year he became president of Connekt, an organisation for addressing road tolling issues in the Netherlands. He presided as Chairman for seven years.
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