Erika van der Linden

Consultant

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Erika van der Linden ir, is a consultant at Technopolis Group, based in Amsterdam. She has a strong quantitative background in modelling societal challenges. Her focus area is sustianable technology policy. Erika’s core skills are big data analysis, and visualization, and programming in languages such as Python and R.

Erika has experience with both quantitative and qualitative methods. In the past, she has often applied data analysis, forecasting (e.g. through system dynamics and exploratory modelling), social network analysis, and econometric models. She is familiar with various quantitative software, such as Excel, Python, Gephi, Matlab, and R, and mainly uses it for data analysis and visualization, and statistical analyses. In terms of qualitative methods, she has extensive experience with desk study, interviews, focus groups and workshops. She has extensive experience with policy for innovation for a sustainable economy from her studies, PhD and previous projects.

Erika is currently advising the UN Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) on how they could monitor whether the companies they collaborate with for the flagship program Switch to Circular Economy are making progress towards more circular business practices. She is also contributing to the evaluation of the impact of the Horizon 2020 program on the transition to a sustainable economy. Previously, Erika has worked on the economic potential study on encouraging increasing sustainability of the heat demand in the non-ETS industry in Flanders. Next to her consultancy work, she is a PhD candidate at Radboud University in Nijmegen, where she focuses on the contributions of companies to SDGs, and how to find new, better sources of data to research this topic, using techniques such as webscraping, machine learning and artificial intelligence.

Prior to joining Technopolis Group, Erika studied at Delft University of Technology, Leiden University and Università di Bologna; respectively a BSc and Msc in Engineering and Policy Analysis, a BSc in Sustainability, and an exchange semester in Resource Economics. She interned at ING Bank, and worked at Delft University of Technology as a researcher of metal markets and at Nationale Nederlanden as a Financial Analyst. She was a manager of startup Green Tickets (focus on sustainable travelling), and worked at startup Disdrometrics (focus on supporting farmers in emerging markets to optimize their harvests). Erika is fluent in Dutch and English, and speaks basic Italian, French, German, and Mandarin.