Dr Nicholas Gruen is a widely published policy economist, entrepreneur and commentator. He has advised Cabinet Ministers, sat on Australia’s Productivity Commission and founded Lateral Economics and Peach Financial.

Dr Gruen is the CEO of Lateral Economics and is Visiting Professor at Kings College London and Adjunct Professor at UTS. He chairs the Open Knowledge Foundation (Australian Chapter) and is Patron of the Australian Digital Alliance, which brings together Australia’s libraries, universities, and major providers of digital infrastructure such as Google and Yahoo. He is a member of the Council of the National Library of Australia.

Dr Gruen was Chair of The Australian Centre for Social Innovation until 2016 and Chair of the Australian Government’s principal innovation advisory body, Innovation Australia, until 2014.

He was second shareholder and Chairman of successful San Francisco based startup, data analytics crowdsourcing platform Kaggle, subsequently acquired by Google in March 2017. He is an angel investor in various other Australian and international startups including Breezedocs, Slant.co, HealthKit and Lendable.

He was a member of a review of pharmaceutical patent extensions in 2013.  In 2009, he chaired Australia’s internationally acclaimed Government 2.0 Taskforce. In 2008, he was a member of a major review of into Australia’s Innovation system.

Dr Gruen has a BA (Hons – First Class) in History (1981) and a PhD in Public Policy from the ANU (1998), and an LLB (Hons) from the University of Melbourne (1982).