Dr Holger Schmidt is a digital economist and author. He has been working on digital economics for around two decades and looks at digitalisation from an economist's perspective. His blog "Netzökonomie", which was awarded best economics blog, is one of the most popular publications on the digital economy in Germany. Schmidt is the inventor of the Platform Index. His focus is on platform economics, digital business models, artificial intelligence and climate tech. Holger Schmidt studies economics at the Justus Liebig University in Gießen and will become a staff member at the Chair of Developing Countries Research after graduating there. He researches environmental economics and receives his doctorate in 1997. Schmidt then worked as an economics editor for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, where until the end of 2011 he was in charge of the topics Internet, environment, energy and video games as well as the weekly special page "Netzwirtschaft" and coordinated the cooperation between the newspaper and the Internet editorial team in the FAZ's online presence. In 2012 he moved to Focus and since 2017 he has been writing for Handelsblatt as a columnist for digital economy. Holger Schmidt is an advisor to "The Original Platform Fund" and co-hosts an FAZ podcast on artificial intelligence and publishes Germany's most popular newsletter on digital transformation. He teaches digital transformation at TU Darmstadt and is a senior partner at Ecodynamics. His clients include the Deutsche Bundesbank, Daimler, Porsche, Alibaba, Microsoft, Facebook, Salesforce, UBS, Samsung, Otto Group, Linde, Deutsche Bank and Sanofi. In his lectures on the digital economy, the much sought-after keynote speaker conveys the latest findings from science and business in a lively and concise manner. As a lecturer at the TU Darmstadt and the Executive School of the University of St. Gallen, the economist is able to explain the effects of digitalisation to a broad audience in a comprehensible way, while at the same time providing valuable impulses to executives at a high level.