Parth Tikiwala, Head of Global Public Sector at Nemetschek Group, and Head of Public Sector at Bluebeam, has joined the MSU Economics Alumni Advisory Board. The mission of the board is to work with economics' faculty, students, and staff to support and strengthen the department’s goals and academic standards while providing advice to the department on how it can better serve its students, MSU, the U.S., and the economics profession. Tikiwala graduated with his B.S. in economics with honors in 2009.
Tikiwala's motivation for joining the board was inspired by the uniqueness of the study of economics and his fond memories as an economics major at MSU.
"Comparative advantage teaches you that the relevant question is never what you can do in some absolute sense — it's what's possible for you, specifically, given where you actually stand," he explained. "Professor Raoul Minetti, my advisor through the Ronald E. McNair Post-Baccalaureate Scholars Program, spent countless office hours doing exactly that calculation with me — running your own comparative math before accepting someone else's verdict on your limits— and that has outlasted every model I learned to draw," he said.
Tikiwala often reflects on the single idea that every choice is measured by what it costs a person to forgo. He looks back on time Professor Raoul Minetti spent in office hours working with him that came at the expense of Minetti's ability to spend his time elsewhere.
"I did not register that cost at 20, but I register it now," he said. "Joining this board is the closest instrument I have to repay it choosing deliberately to spend time on a student's questions rather than on whatever else might claim it, because someone once made that same calculation about mine, and it changed the trajectory of everything after."
After graduation, Tikiwala's path began in federal statistics as an economist with the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Current Employment Statistics program, first at the state and area level in Michigan, then nationally across the Financial Activities and Wholesale Trade sectors. He transitioned to the National Archives to work in data management, and then to the Executive Office of the President's Office of Management and Budget, where he served as a federal data strategy fellow and helped shape the first U.S. Federal Data Strategy — the government-wide framework establishing data as a strategic federal asset rather than an administrative byproduct. Acting director roles followed, in science and infrastructure policy and later in technology modernization, before he moved into the private sector to apply the same discipline to infrastructure delivery at scale.
"The throughline is direct: economics trains you to reason under incomplete information as a permanent condition, not a temporary inconvenience which describes most consequential public policy and infrastructure decisions rather precisely," he said.
Today, Tikiwala leads the public sector strategy for two organizations within the Nemetschek Group. At the Group level, he heads global public sector setting the strategy across the United States, Germany, and India—helping public infrastructure authorities and delivery agencies modernize how they plan, build, and manage the critical infrastructure their citizens depend on. At Bluebeam, his focus narrows to public sector strategy for the U.S. government and the broader AEC ecosystem.
"The throughline across both is the same conviction: infrastructure delivery is only as good as the data and digital discipline behind it," he said.
As Tikiwala reflects on his time at MSU, one more experience stands out among others.
"Is there a finer institution in American collegiate life than Homecoming and that too at MSU? I have yet to encounter a persuasive rebuttal," he said. "My own Homecoming memories remain unusually vivid, and serving on the Court was among the genuine privileges of my time in East Lansing. This is the kind of experience that reminds you a university doesn't merely confer a degree. It has the more ambitious habit of deciding, over four years, who you become."
The MSU Department of Economics is exceedingly grateful to Tikiwala for giving his time, talents and resources to serve on the board.
To learn more about the MSU Economics Alumni Advisory Board, visit https://econ.msu.edu/alumni/advisory-board.