Nicolas Friederici

Nicolas is Senior Researcher at the Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society (HIIG) in Berlin. He studies how economic development happens in the digital age, and how the opportunities of digital technologies unfold unevenly across the world. Focal areas are digital platform entrepreneurship in Europe and Africa, inequality in the global digital economy, and entrepreneurial ecosystems and innovation hubs in low- and middle-income countries.

Nicolas holds a doctoral degree from the Oxford Internet Institute (OII). He has held positions as Postdoctoral Researcher at OII, visiting researcher in Stanford, and Mobile Innovation Associate at infoDev (World Bank). He was a Kellogg College Fellow, a Clarendon Scholar, a Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship grantee, and a Fulbright scholar. He completed his MA in Telecommunications, Information Studies and Media at Michigan State University and holds a Diplom in Media Management from the University of Cologne.

Nicolas is also active as a consultant: for instance, he did work on the platform economy for GIZ, helped the World Bank assess digital entrepreneurship ecosystems in Bangladesh and the Caribbean, and contributed to UNCTAD’s 2019 Digital Economy Report.