Photo by Janice Fullman

Nicholas P. Sullivan is a Fellow at the Center for Emerging Market Enterprises at the Fletcher School. He is co-chair (with Prof. Kim Wilson) of The Fletcher School Leadership Program for Financial Inclusion, an innovative residency program designed for Central Bankers from emerging and frontier markets.

Sullivan has written widely about technology, entrepreneurship and investment, a path he followed after hosting international Internet conferences for entrepreneurs while he served as VP/Editor-in-Chief of Inc.com (a sister company to Inc. magazine). He is the co-author (with Prof. Jeswald Salacuse) of “Do BITS Really Work: Bilateral Investment Treaties and Their Grand Bargain (Harvard International Law Journal, 2007 and Oxford University Press, 2009), and author of “Cell Phones Provide Significant Income Gains for Low-Income Americans” (New Millennium Research Council, 2008). He is currently working on a book about mobile money and banking beyond branches in Africa.

He is also publisher of Innovations: Technology/Governance/Globalization (MIT Press), which promotes “entrepreneurial solutions to global challenges” with 1st-person case studies written by entrepreneurs. Innovations has produced special editions for the world Economic Forum, Skoll World Forum, GSM Association, Schwab Foundation and Clinton Global Initiative.

Previously, Sullivan was a founding partner of the Global Horizon Fund, a private equity fund-of-funds for frontier markets, where he researched country and fund investment targets. And he was VP/Editor-in-Chief of Home Office Computing (Scholastic, Inc.), once known as the “bible of self-employment.” For 13 years, he wrote the Workstyles column, chronicling life and work in the information age.

He has chaired the Inc. E-Strategies Conference, the Inc./Cisco Growing with Technology Awards, and the US West [Qwest] New Ventures Seed Capital Competition, and spoken frequently at forums such as The Fletcher School, M.I.T., Wharton School of Business, Harvard Kennedy School, Carnegie Mellon, Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, Aspen Institute, Evian Group, TIEcon East (The Indus Entrepreneurs),  Broadband World Forum, Ashoka Egypt, Marconi Society and Google. 

To promote You Can Hear Me Now (and develop this website), Sullivan received a generous grant from the John Templeton Foundation. In 2007-8, he was a Visiting Scholar at MIT’s Legatum Center for Development & Entrepreneurship. He is the recipient of a 2011 Bellagio Fellowship (Rockefeller Foundation) to write about mobile-money innovations in Africa. Sullivan is a graduate of Harvard University and The Fletcher School.