The Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy (BMWE), as a shareholder in the Scientific Institute for Infrastructure and Communication Services (WIK), has appointed Dr Volker Stocker as Chairman of the Management Board and Director of WIK; he will lead the organisation alongside Alex Dieke, who serves as Chief Financial Officer.
Volker Stocker holds a PhD in economics and heads the multidisciplinary research group ‘Digital Economy, Internet Ecosystem and Internet Policy’ at the Weizenbaum Institute. In addition, Dr Volker Stocker is, amongst other roles, an associated researcher in the ‘Internet Architecture and Management’ research group at the Technical University of Berlin (TU Berlin) and at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics (Department 3: Internet Architecture) in Saarbrücken and an affiliated scholar with the Dynamic Competition Initiative (EUI & UC Berkeley Haas School of Business). Furthermore, Dr Volker Stocker is a board member of the International Telecommunications Society (ITS) and Co-Chair of the ITS Europe. In his research, Dr Volker Stocker has adopted an interdisciplinary approach, combining different areas of expertise and methods to investigate critical issues related to the digital economy at the intersection of technology, economics, regulation and policy.
We are convinced that Dr Volker Stocker, with his broad research profile, his interdisciplinary approach and his national and international network, is ideally suited to lead WIK and, in particular, to position it for future-oriented topics such as AI, the data and platform economy, and cybersecurity.
WIK will thus further strengthen its position as one of Europe’s leading research and consultancy institutes in the field of regulated network industries and platforms, and will continue to play a key role in shaping national and European broadband, regulatory and digitalisation policy through innovative academic contributions.
Dr Volker Stocker will take up his post as Managing Director and Director of WIK on 1 October 2026 and will simultaneously become Managing Director of WIK-Consult GmbH. Dr Cara Schwarz-Schilling, who has successfully steered the course of WIK for over 6½ years, will step down from the management board on 31 July 2026 upon reaching the retirement age. She will remain associated with the institute as a Senior Advisor.