Soumitra Dutta, the former dean of Oxford Said Business School, is best known not for building a business school or a company, but for creating a benchmarking tool.

The Global Innovation Index (GII) measures how about 130 economies turn investment into innovation. Dutta co-created the index in 2007. Each year, the World Intellectual Property Organization publishes the GII, which uses 80 indicators across seven categories: institutions, human capital, infrastructure, market sophistication, business sophistication, knowledge outputs, and creative outputs. The GII has influenced national policies, and when India first entered the top 40, it was celebrated in New Delhi.

Soumitra 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․

In 2012, he moved to Cornell to become the Anne and Elmer Lindseth Dean of the Johnson Graduate School of Management. Later, he became the founding dean of the SC Johnson College of Business, where he led the merger of three business schools, secured a record $150 million naming gift, and helped develop a joint MBA program with Tsinghua, the only Ivy League program partly based in mainland China.

Next, Dutta became the Peter Moores Dean of Saïd Business School at Oxford in 2022. His goal is to help make it one of the world’s leading young business schools and a global leader in AI readiness, digital transformation, and competitiveness.