I work as startup trainer, teacher, consultant, investor and conference facilitator. I'm the founder and director of ClimateLaunchpad. ClimateLaunchpad is the world's largest green business ideas competition, with 45 countries participating in 2018. As a trainer and teacher I am working across Europe, Africa, the Americas, Asia and Oceania.
As deputy director Entrepreneurship of Climate-KIC (2012-2016) I developed and implemented the entrepreneur centers at the Climate-KIC co-locations and regional centers and set up the Climate-KIC Accelerator Program. Since then around 1.000 startups have been part of the Climate-KIC accelerator and these teams have raised approximately € 850 million. This makes the Climate-KIC accelerator by far the most successful and largest accelerator in the world for cleantech startups.
At Cyclotron Road (2016-2017), the energy technology accelerator program on the UC Berkeley campus (Lawrence Berkeley National Lab) I designed the teaching curriculum and trained two cohorts of what CR calls 'hardtech startups'.
Earlier I was the founder of Knowledge Land, the leading Dutch think tank on boosting the knowledge economy. As chairman of KL I was recruited by the Dutch Prime Minister as the secretary of the Dutch Innovation Platform, chaired by the PM. I've been teaching Innovation & Entrepreneurship since 2007 as lecturer at institutions like UC Berkeley, Utrecht University and professor at HAN University of Applied Sciences. I have a Bachelor degree in Environmental Technology of Wageningen University of Research and a Master degree in Political Sciences at the University of Amsterdam. Additional education includes the teaching case methodology courses 1 and 2 and the private equity and venture capital course, both at the Harvard Business School. At the Harvard Kennedy School of Government I followed the Innovation in Government program. Currently I am teaching entrepreneurship and innovation in executive education programs at UC Berkeley Extension, the Climate-KIC Business School and the Masters Program of Utrecht University.