Bio
Jonas Pentzien is Head of the Research Field “Business, Value Chains and Consumption” at the Berlin-based Institute for Ecological Economy Research (IÖW). His work focuses on sustainability-oriented transformation pathways for the digital economy and on developing tools that support and sustain cooperative businesses in digital contexts. Since 2022, he has contributed his expertise on digitalization and sustainability to Plattform Industrie 4.0. A political scientist by training, he investigates the framework conditions for alternative economies, particularly in the platform economy, and studies how political institutions shape processes of technology-driven change across different national contexts. Since 2017, he has worked on platform cooperatives as part of a five-year research project funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research, examining the conditions under which democratically owned and governed platforms can thrive. He studied Political Economy and Comparative Politics at Johns Hopkins University, the Free University of Berlin, and the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, has taught courses on the digital economy at the Free University of Berlin, and he is an affiliate faculty of the Institute for the Cooperative Digital Economy at The New School.