The Master of Public Policy graduate was recognised for helping make German public administration fit for the 21st century.
Faruk Tuncer is the Hertie School’s 2024 Alumni Achievement Award. The award recognises his exceptional contribution to making public administration more efficient.
Tuncer is the CEO of Polyteia, a company that provides public administration with platforms that integrate data from various sources at the municipal, state and federal levels, empowering them for better decision making. Thanks to his company’s pioneering work, the administrative burden in several cities has decreased, services have improved, and citizen engagement has increased.
Tuncer will receive the Alumni Achievement Award at the 2024 Hertie Summit & Alumni Reunion. We sat down with Tuncer to chat about his inspiration to create Polyteia and how the Hertie School’s programmes give students an extra edge in running a business.
In the video interview, he tells how his experience working in the government inspired him to start his own company. “I had the feeling that municipalities worked on a factless basis,” he remembers, “and I always wanted to found a company.” Policymakers told him that they had data, but that it was not organised in a way that would effectively inform their work. Still, he was unsure. “Before I founded Polyteia, I always thought that people must have tested this idea before. But after some research, I saw that this was not the case,” the 2016 graduate of the Master in Public Policy programme said.
Tuncer’s advice to current and prospective students: “If you see a pattern in a recurring problem and no one else is addressing it, you are probably the only one addressing it, and you should go for it.” He also tells them not to worry too much about being able to run a business. You learn how to run a company by doing it, he says, “but what’s much more important is the knowledge that you gain from the MPP or MIA or Data Science degree, because that’s something that not everybody has”.