Nicole Cecchele Lago is a Borderstep Research Fellow collaborating with the Sustainable Entrepreneurship team. Her research focuses on the intersection of innovation ecosystems and scaling green tech ventures.

She is currently finalizing her PhD in Industrial Engineering at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), Brazil. Her doctoral research investigates the success and failure factors of startups within the Brazilian context and the role of innovation ecosystems in fostering impact innovations. Additionally, her work analyzes the microfoundations of innovativeness in German startups.

During her PhD, she was a visiting researcher at Linköping University, Sweden, where she analyzed the structure and effectiveness of the Swedish National Incubation Program and support for circularity within regional entrepreneurial ecosystems.

Nicole specializes in advanced quantitative methods, particularly causal inference, and applies machine learning techniques to evaluate the effectiveness of innovation policies and support structures for startups. Driven by the challenge of bridging the gap between scientific excellence and scalable environmental solutions, she aims to generate data-driven insights that enable policymakers and innovation ecosystem actors to better support entrepreneurs and green tech ventures, especially during the scaling phase.

Nicole is also the founder of Startup Ladder, a diagnostic platform for early-stage startup business proposals and incubator portfolios, which originated from her master’s thesis. Furthermore, she contributed to the development of a methodology for startup building and evaluation for Startup Academy, an undergraduate program in innovative business management in Brazil.

In her free time, Nicole is an avid runner. She loves exploring new cities on foot and is currently training for her first marathon. She also enjoys playing beach volleyball and is often found reading or managing her digital library on her Kindle.