Christoph Mertens studied computer science at the Technical University of Dortmund.
After his time at the university, he worked for the Fraunhofer Institute for Material Flow and Logistics – IML where he was engaged in the field of business analysis and software selection projects, as well as Industry 4.0 related projects, which were research and industry driven.

Since June 2018 Christoph works for the International Data Spaces Association (IDSA). In his position as Head of Adoption, he is responsible for bringing the IDS approach to life and to manage different working streams to fulfil this goal. Since with Version 3 of the IDS reference architecture the first stable version of the architecture was published in beginning of 2019, the time has come to bring the approach to life. This is driven by two main paths, the industry driven path, where companies like ATOS, Deutsche Telekom, TNO, and others define business models and the road map for an economically driven implementation of the IDS ecosystem. And the second path, which is driven by our various research projects, that is focused on raising the TRL of IDS components – like app stores, brokers, vocabulary providers, connectors – and exploring different technologies to implement these components in pilots from different domains. To support these two paths the IDSA has different domain specific communities and liaisons with international initiatives.
As Head of Adoption Christoph is also driving the international Hub Initiative which supports the IDSA to bring the IDS approach to national markets and local initiatives. Currently there are IDSA Hubs in the Netherlands, Finland, France, Italy, Spain and the Czech Republic.