Tim Maurice Steiner is from Saarland, Germany, and studies behavioral science at Duke Kunshan University. He developed CIVINCO as a research project and is working it up into a policy proposal.

His research interest is the behavioural foundations of institutional decisions about innovation: how institutions must be designed so that people entrust them with decisions under uncertainty.

Alongside CIVINCO, he is co-founder and managing partner of RIFORMA, a deep-tech start-up producing dissolving pulp from sisal processing residues, and leads the PROMIS research group at Duke Kunshan University.