From 1996-2001, De Brouwer was a sponsor of the MIT Medialab, and sat on the programming board of Nicholas Negroponte’s Digital Life project. Inspired by Negroponte’s work, he set up the ‘Fundamental Research’ laboratory Starlab, that together with Microsoft Founder Paul Allen’s Interval Research Corporation and Xerox Parc, specialized in Blue-Sky (Deep Future) research. The laboratory initially worked on BANG (the consilience of Bits, Atoms, Neurons and Genes), and had at its peak a full-time staff of 111 scientists from 36 countries with combined expertise across 40 disciplines. The laboratory met its demise with the end of the dot-com bubble in 2001 after five years in operation.

Starlab produced generic patents in i-wear, the fusion between clothing (fashion) and computing (technology). I-wear was the brainchild of Walter van De Velde (now EU FP7 FET Open) who worked with Walter Van Beirendonck for creative design, Alex Hum (now Orange Imagineering) and Ozan Cakmakci (Optics, Florida University). The patents were later sold to Philips Electronics. Starlab also worked on the Alcubierre Drive for which the Russian physicist Sergei Krasnikov was recruited, and laid the foundations for further research into MPEG-21.

Much like the funding model employed by MIT Media Lab, academic and corporate partners received shared intellectual property rights to research and patents generated by the lab. Consortia members, clients and sponsors included local and national governments, international corporations and private investors including NASA, the National Science Foundation, Levi Strauss, France Telecom, Adidas, Siemens, Philips, Bekaert, Energizer, W.L. Gore, Recticel, Samsonite, Verhaert, Nokia, the Institut National de l'Audiovisuel and the European Commission.

Investors behind Starlab were Starscape NV/SA, Hunza Consolidation (Malaysia), TMT One AB (Sweden), Rowland Family (UK), Martin Velasco (Spain), Baron Guy Ullens, Pythagoras Participations, Luc De Vos, Patrick van Glabeke, Johan Helsingius, BBL and Nicholas Negroponte.