Meet the cbsCSR PhDs: Kristian Roed Nielsen
Kristian’s dissertation sets out to explore the often ignored role of the consumer (end-user) within sustainable innovation by examining the potential of reward-based crowdfunding in enabling sustainable entrepreneurship. It explores under which conditions and to what extent reward-based crowdfunding could benefit entrepreneurs with social and/or environmentally-oriented products. Kristian’s Ph.D. project is part-financed by a EU FP7 project called EU-InnovatE, which has the overall goal of investigating the innovative and entrepreneurial roles that end-users take in shaping a green EU-economy.
“In the first place I didn’t really believe in this idea that consumers [end-users] could also be sustainable innovators in their own right”, Kristian tells about his initial doubts about the project. But as he got into the project, led by Professor Lucia Reisch, he was increasingly excited by the potential role that “crowd” could play in driving, financing and enabling sustainable ventures.
From disliking Political Science to becoming an academic
“I started out studying Political Science, mostly because that was what my dad had studied. But I didn’t find it interesting and I didn’t believe in the theories we learned about human behavior. You were kind of either in the social constructivist camp or the rational actor camp neither which really made sense to me” says Kristian. But what really triggered Kristian’s’ interest was behavioral economics (BE).
“I liked behavioral economics (BE), because it introduced a degree of imperfection to viewing individual behavior – I think we humans are both capable of great intelligence and compassion, while at other times perfectly capable of acting selfish, short-sighted, and a little dumb. I was struck by the consequences that BE could mean for policy – imagine if the guiding models we use to predict behavior and inform policy were incomplete and flawed.”
Reading up on the topic, Kristian discovered the work carried out by Lucia Reisch at the cbsCSR center. When he became aware of the fact that Lucia was working on a project on nudging, he did not hesitate and contacted her, in order to try to join her project as a research assistant. This unsolicited application marked the start of Kristian’s’ career as a researcher at the cbsCSR center and sparked his interest in consumer behavior, crowdfunding and its potential in driving sustainable innovations.
While Kristian enjoys life as an academic, producing new insight in the area of crowdfunding, he also aims to bring his insights and interest in crowdfunding into practice. Aiming to create a platform for sustainable entrepreneurs, Kristian says “It is a researches dream to bring things together and make it work. It’s complexity, but it is also a playground”.
Asked how he experiences working at cbsCSR, Kristian expressed that the center has an openness and great willingness to support and promote new types of research, which he doesn’t think he could find other places. Kristian is part of the Consumer Behavior Research Group, which is supported by the cbsCSR center.