Digital Industrial Policy for Europe

Thibaut Kleiner is the Director for Policy, Strategy and Outreach at DG Connect. He has worked since 2001 at the European Commission. The first ten years of his career in the Commission were spent in the area of competition policy (merger, antitrust and State aid). He was notably member of the cabinet of Neelie Kroes, Commissioner for Competition, in 2007-2010 and head of unit for State aid coordination in DG Competition. In September 2011, he moved to the digital policy area, as advisor of Vice-President Neelie Kroes, in charge of the Digital Agenda, and supervised Internet policies at large (Internet Governance, cybersecurity, cloud, data). From January 2014 to June 2016, he was head of unit in charge of network technologies (5G and Internet of Things) in DG Connect. From June 2016 to December 2019 he was the deputy head of cabinet of Commissioner Oettinger, in charge of Budget and Human Resources and he then came back to DG Connect to head the unit in charge of Research Strategy and Coordination. An economist by training, Thibaut holds a Master from HEC Paris and a PhD from the London School of Economics.

Hendrik Bourgeois is Intel’s Vice President of Government Affairs in Europe, representing Intel with European governments, EU institutions, and public stakeholders on a wide variety of issues, promoting Intel’s growth and investment strategy in Europe. He is the former President of the American Chamber of
Commerce to the EU, and he has a long career in the private sector including at Apple, where he led Apple’s government affairs function in Europe, and focused on EU digital policy initiatives. Before that, Hendrik served for almost two decades in several senior executive positions at General Electric (GE) including as GE’s General Counsel Europe and GE’s head of European Affairs. Hendrik worked as an attorney in private practice in Washington DC and Brussels, obtained his law degree at the Rijksuniversiteit Gent, Belgium, and has an LL.M. degree from Harvard Law School.

Prof Dr Paul Timmers is a research associate at the University of Oxford, Oxford Internet Institute, professor at European University Cyprus, visiting professor at KU Leuven and the University of Rijeka, senior advisor EPC Brussels, President of the Supervisory Board Estonian eGovernance Academy and CEO of iivii.  Previously, he was Director at the European Commission/DG CONNECT where has held responsibility for legislation and funding programmes for cybersecurity, eID, digital privacy, digital health, smart cities, and e-government. At the European Commission, he was also a cabinet member of European Commissioner Liikanen. He worked as manager of a software department in a large ICT company and co-founded an ICT start-up. He holds a physics PhD from Radboud University (Nijmegen, NL), MBA from Warwick University (UK), EU fellowship at UNC Chapel Hill (US), and a cybersecurity qualification from Harvard. His main interests are digital policy, geopolitics, and Europe. He frequently publishes and speaks on the interplay of digital developments with sovereignty, cybersecurity, industrial policy, and sectoral policies such as digital health and is regularly advising governments and think tanks.

Grania Holzwarth is head of EU competition policy for Deutsche Telekom in Brussels. As part of the international competition team at DT, her focus has been on ongoing competition cases in the field of telecoms mergers and antitrust cases in the ICT sector in the EU and US, as well as the development of competition policy in the context of digitalisation.

Beyond that, she is the Chair of ETNO´s Competition Policy Taskforce and the Vice Chair of ICLA’s EU chapter.

Bruno Liebhaberg is Executive Chairman of the think tank Centre on Regulation in Europe (CERRE) which he founded in 2010.

From 2018 to 2021, he was also the first Chairman of the European Union Observatory on the Online Platform Economy. He is also an Honorary Professor at the Université Libre de Bruxelles’ Solvay Brussels School of Economics and Management (SBS-EM ULB) where he taught from 1979 to 2018. Earlier in his career, he advised former European Commission President Jacques Delors on industry and R&D matters related to the completion of the EU Single Market.

He holds a Master’s in management sciences from SBS-EM ULB and a Ph.D. in Industrial Relations from the London School of Economics and Political Science.

¹Also representing B.LIEBHABERG S.A., Director General

²Member of the Strategic Committee