Sebastiaan van Herk

SH in Dutch

 

Dr Sebastiaan van Herk has 20 years of experience and a relentless drive to ‘Grow Talent’, ‘Accelerate Innovation’ and generate ‘Value from science and technology’.

Mr. Van Herk is as Partner at Bax & Company responsible for: company strategy & management and talent growth. He leads 2 focus areas and talented teams in: Environment and Digital Technologies, and liaison to the units of European Programmes and Communications. As senior consultant his role is often to conceptualise and steer innovation projects and alliances to maximum impact. He enjoys mobilising and facilitating inspiring and impact-driven international collaborations on new sustainability topics.

Since 2002 he has defined, coordinated and delivered innovation, business and policy projects for various multinational companies and SMEs; national, regional & local governments; and research institutes. These include over 50 international projects with well over €200M in innovation funding, that have guided and mobilised a multiple in public and private investments. His current project portfolio comprises in Environment: climate adaptation, liveable and healthy cities, sustainable agriculture, circular economy, sustainable procurement, infrastructure and construction. And in Digital technologies: blockchain, open source and open data. smart city, digital public infrastructure.

Sebastiaan holds a PhD degree from IHE-Delft & TU Delft in Climate Adaptation & Water Management and an MSc degree (cum laude) in Technology, Policy & Management from TU Delft (2003). He studied Industrial Engineering at the UPC Barcelona & Economics at the Erasmus University in Rotterdam.

He is founding member of the Flood Resilience Group IHE-Delft (NL). He is guest professor at UPC (ES) and Southeast University (China). He has delivered multiple research projects and over 30 scientific and professional publications. He has been appointed Advocate for UN-DRR and Expert for UN Environment. He has developed the Global Center on Adaptation as external coordinator since its inception. He contributes to educational and capacity building programmes. He is an experienced speaker and facilitator of workshops at international conferences.

Languages: English, Spanish, German, Dutch and Catalan fluently and notions of French.

Specialties: Open Innovation, Research & Development, Technology & Business strategy, Policy Development, Project creation and management, Facilitation and collaboration.