Soumitra Dutta Oxford Dean (Former)
A look at the career journey of Soumitra Dutta, the scholar behind the Global Innovation Index

soumitra dutta oxford dean
Soumitra Dutta is the architect behind the GII

The most lasting thing Soumitra Dutta, former dean of Oxford Said Business School, has built is not a business school or a company․ It's a benchmarking tool.

The Global Innovation Index (GII) tracks performance of around 130 economies on how much they turn investment into innovative output․ Dutta c-created the index in 2007. The annual GII‚ produced by the World Intellectual Property Organization‚ uses 80 indicators in seven categories (institutions‚ human capital‚ infrastructure‚ market sophistication‚ business sophistication‚ knowledge outputs‚ and creative outputs)․ Governments' national policies are influenced by the GII․ India's first appearance in GII's top 40 produced celebrations in New Delhi․

Dutta was born and brought up in Chandigarh․ He was second in his class at IIT Delhi‚ graduating in 1985 with a degree in electrical engineering and computer science․ He later attended UC Berkeley for a master's degree in computer science‚ a master's degree in business administration‚ and a PhD in computer science. In 1989‚ he joined the faculty of INSEAD, in France, where he would stay more than 20 years‚ as, variously, Dean of Technology and E-Learning‚ Dean of Executive Education‚ and Dean of External Relations․ He also established the college's eLab (electronic laboratory)‚ a facility for big data analytics‚ in 1999‚ years before the term big data became common․ He knew where things were going․ He usually did․

He moved to Cornell in 2012 to become the Anne and Elmer Lindseth Dean of the Johnson Graduate School of Management. He was later appointed the founding dean of the SC Johnson College of Business where he oversaw the merger of three separate business schools‚ a record-high $150 million naming gift‚ and the joint development of an MBA degree with Tsinghua‚ the only Ivy League program operating partly on mainland China․

Oxford was next․ Soumitra Dutta became Peter Moores Dean of Saïd Business School in 2022‚ with a mandate to make this one of the youngest great business schools in the world‚ a global leader in thinking on AI readiness‚ digital transformation and global competitiveness․