Dr. Malte Toetzke
Malte is a postdoctoral researcher at TU Munich and a Senior Research Fellow at the Net Zero Lab of the Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition. Driven by a passion for sustainable innovation, his research explores how innovation in climate-tech drives industrial transformations. Specifically, he studies how public and private actors collaborate to develop leading innovation clusters that accelerate the commercialization and adoption of climate technologies across different sectors and regions.
To tackle these challenges, Malte combines advanced methods from machine learning and economics. His work leverages large language models (LLMs) to extract socio-economic insights from diverse text sources, such as company reports and social media. These insights enable descriptive and econometric analyses that inform innovation policy, finance, and strategy.
Malte earned his Ph.D. from ETH Zurich in June 2024 for his dissertation, titled "Navigating the Climate Transition: Informing Climate Finance and Innovation Policy with Machine Learning" . His papers have been published in leading international journals, such as Nature Sustainability and Nature Climate Change, and have won several awards, including the Impact Award of the University of St. Gallen and the Academic Research Award by the Financial Times.
