Dr. Nicole Stuber-Berries
Dr. Nicole Stuber-Berries is an economist and digital transformation expert operating at the intersection of strategy, emerging technologies and industry innovation. She advises and empowers organizations, particularly within the tourism ecosystem, to translate technological disruption into measurable strategic advantage through rigorous, evidence-based decision-making.
Educated at the University of Oxford (Honors BA in Economics and Politics) and the University of Geneva (MA and PhD in International Relations), her international academic trajectory across Shanghai, Beijing, Taipei and Berlin shaped her global and interdisciplinary perspective on economic transformation and digital ecosystems.
Following her doctorate, she joined Accenture, rising to Managing Director, where she led digital transformation initiatives. Her work focused on digital business models, growth strategies, operational excellence, the strategic deployment of emerging technologies to redesign client experiences, build ecosystem-based value propositions and enable end-to-end organizational transformation.
Today, she serves as Co-Head, Professor and Lecturer at the Institute of Tourism and Mobility at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts (HSLU). In this role, she bridges consulting expertise with academic research, shaping the future competitiveness of Switzerland’s tourism industry by advancing innovation, digital capabilities and next-generation industry models.
Session
While the Ethereum roadmap makes strides in protocol efficiency, data availability and cryptographic security, a bottleneck remains unaddressed: the social layer of technology acceptance. As we transition from ‘building the infrastructure’ to ‘onboarding the world’, the success of decentralised systems will be dictated not only by their technical throughput but by their psychological and socio-economic alignment with end-users.
This session bridges the gap between rigorous protocol engineering and academic behavioural science. By examining a tested tourism use case, we move beyond speculative narratives to present empirical data on how blockchain solutions are perceived in a high-touch, trust-dependent industry.
The narrative follows the journey of a decentralised application within the Swiss tourism sector, illustrating that ‘acceptance engineering’ is as vital as ‘protocol engineering’. By treating social acceptance as a variable that requires the same level of academic rigour as a consensus algorithm, we propose a more holistic framework for the next decade of Ethereum’s growth.