Hogeschool Wittenborg was founded in Deventer in 1987 by a local businessman named H. Nijkamp, with an explicitly practical curriculum aimed at the Dutch financial services industry. The pivot came in 2002, when the school partnered with BTC, an international family consultancy, to build English-language degree programs for foreign students. The Netherlands had decided to position itself as an education exporter, and Wittenborg was early to the strategy. In 2006 the school earned full accreditation from the Dutch and Flemish accreditation agency NVAO, the official seal that lets a Dutch institution call itself a university and grant recognized degrees. By 2013 the Dutch name Hogeschool had been retired in favor of the English Wittenborg University of Applied Sciences.

Apeldoorn wanted higher education. The city, better known historically for its paper mills and the Het Loo royal palace, had been trying to attract universities as part of a broader push to reposition itself as more than a comfortable provincial center. In 2010 the city government offered Wittenborg a wing inside the Aventus building, and the school accepted, moving its main campus the 15 kilometers west from Deventer. By 2015 it had opened two more locations - one on Spoorstraat in Apeldoorn, another in the Dali Building in Amsterdam - and the institution's footprint kept growing. In September 2016 the Dutch Minister of Education, Jet Bussemaker, singled Wittenborg out in a letter to Parliament as a model of how a Dutch school could go fully international.

The bachelor's program is in International Business Administration, with eight specialization tracks ranging from hospitality management to logistics and international trade to entrepreneurship and SME management. The master's catalog runs to four degrees - hospitality, event management, tourism (each an M.Sc., the tourism and hospitality M.Sc. degrees offered in partnership with the University of Brighton in the UK), plus an MBA. The orientation is unapologetically practical, the language is English, and the classrooms are full of accents. Programs run on a quarterly cycle to allow rolling intake from international students whose academic calendars and visa timelines do not match the European September start.

In 2013 the university launched Wittenborg University Press, a publishing arm aimed at producing books for its students, alumni, and the broader business-education audience. The first titles included Sustainable Value Creation by Teun Wolters in 2013 and, in 2015, Whisky Burn - Distilleries of Scotland by Vespa, by Ben Birdsall, an English illustrator who has built a body of work travelling Scotland by scooter. The press is modest by commercial standards, but it fits the school's self-image - a small institution that has carved out a distinctive niche by being more international than its size would suggest. Apeldoorn was once a town where Dutch students came to learn from Dutch teachers about Dutch industries. Wittenborg, in a wing of a shared building, runs in another direction entirely.