Photo by Janice Fullman

Nicholas P. Sullivan has written widely about technology, entrepreneurship and development. For the past eight years he has focused on global development and investment, a path he followed after hosting international Internet conferences and radio programs for entrepreneurs while he served as editor in chief of Inc.com (a sister company to Inc. magazine).

He is  publisher of Innovations: Technology/Governance/Globalization (MIT Press), serving as editor for single-theme issues on  Microfinance 2.0 and Mobilizing Markets. Innovations has produced special editions for the World Economic Forum, Skoll World Forum, GSM Association, and the Schwab Foundation. Sullivan was recently named a Fellow at the Center for Emerging Markets Enterprises (The Fletcher School, Tufts University), in its bottom-of-the-pyramid financial inclusion initiative, with a focus on m-banking,

As executive director of the Boston-based Money Matters Institute, a mini think tank dedicated to facilitating dialogue between the private sector and multilateral institutions, he produced the annual Wealth of Nations Index, a holistic ranking of 70 developing countries according to 63 variables. Representing Money Matters, he was a United Nations’ accredited business interlocutor to the International Financing for Development conference (Monterrey, Mexico, 2002), and participated in several follow-on dialogues at the United Nations (Coordination and Cooperation in the Context of the Monterrey Consensus). Since 2004, he has also been a partner of the Global Frontier Fund, a private equity fund-of-funds for frontier markets.

Sullivan was previously a founding editor and later editor-in-chief of Home Office Computing (Scholastic, Inc.) once known as the “bible of self-employment.” As one of the nation’s first high-profile telecommuters, he wrote the popular Workstyles column, which chronicled life and work in the information age, and the book Computer Power for Your Small Business (Random House/American Management Association). During that time he also served as a publishing executive at Scholastic Inc., dealing primarily with Fortune 500 telecom clients. He has chaired the Inc. E-Strategies Conference, the Inc./Cisco Growing with Technology Awards, and the US West New Ventures Seed Capital Competition.

Recent publications include “Do BITs Really Work: Bilateral Investment Treaties and Their Grand Bargain” (Harvard International Law Journal, 2007, and Oxford University Press, 2009), “Clinical Economics” (Compass, Center for Public Leadership, Kennedy School of Government, 2007), and “Cell Phones Provide Significant Income Gains for Low-Income Americans” (New Millenium Research Council, 2008). This paper was part of a larger lobbying effort that persuaded the FCC to open up the Universal Service Fee account to cell phones, and Sullivan was part of TracFone’s 13-state launch of its SafeLink Wireless, subsidized cell phones for low-income households.

After writing You Can Hear Me Now, Sullivan received a generous grant from the John Templeton Foundation to promote the book, through JTF’s “eradicating poverty through free enterprise” initiative.  In 2007-08, he was a Visiting Fellow at the Feinstein Center at Tufts University, and a Visiting Scholar at MIT’s Legatum Center for Development & Entrepreneurship.

Sullivan is a graduate of Harvard University and the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy.