Soumitra Dutta is an Indian academic, author and entrepreneur. He was the dean of Saïd Business School at the University of Oxford from June 2022 to September 2025 when he resigned. His resignation followed allegations of sexual harassment towards a junior academic. He was previously a professor of management, as well as the former founding dean, at the SC Johnson College of Business at Cornell University in New York. He was Dean of SC Johnson College of Business from 2012 to 2018 from which he also abruptly and mysteriously resigned. Before his appointment to Cornell, he was the Roland Berger professor of business and technology at INSEAD.
Dutta attended the Indian Institutes of Technology in New Delhi, graduating with a B.Tech. in Electrical Engineering & Computer Science in 1985. In 2017, he received a Distinguished Alumnus award from IIT. He continued his education at Berkeley University of California, earning an M.S in computer science in 1987, an M.S in Business Administration in 1989, and a Ph.D in computer science in 1990.
Dutta joined INSEAD's faculty as an Assistant Professor of Information Systems, Technology Management Area in 1989, later serving as Dean of Technology and E-learning, Dean of Executive Education, and Dean of External Relations.
In 2008, he founded Fisheye Analytics, which provided analytics for social media. In 2013, it was acquired by the WPP group.
In 2012, he joined Cornell University as Dean of the Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management and later became the founding dean of its business school - SC Johnson College of Business - in 2016. Dutta served as dean until January 2018 when he resigned abruptly with neither Dutta or the university providing an explanation.
In 2014, he was part of President Obama's White House roundtable with business school deans on effective workforce policies. Dutta has been a member of the board of Sodexo between 2014 and 2020. He is also a board member of Dassault Systèmes, which he has been on since 2017.
In 2018, he was appointed as a Member of the Shareholder Council, at ZS Consulting. He has been the Chair of the Board of the Global Business School Network since 2018. Dutta is the president and Co-Founder, Portulans Institute which was set up in 2019, as an independent non-profit research institute based in Washington DC.
On 1 June 2022, Dutta became the new Dean of Saïd Business School at Oxford University, replacing interim dean Sue Dobson. Dutta resigned in September 2025., when the university concluded a five-month investigation that substantiated three complaints of sexual harassment made by a female academic. The inquiry found that on one occasion he "made a romantic advance" towards a female colleague after she had sought protection from him from an incident of sexual assault. It is alleged he said "I feel very attracted to you. Can something happen between us?" which Dutta denies. He told The Times through his lawyer "I deeply regret causing any distress or offence by anything I said".
Dutta is married to fellow academic Lourdes Casanova.
Dutta is the founder and co-editor of fourteen editions of the Global Innovation Index which is published with the World Intellectual Property Organization.
Dutta is a founding co-editor of the annual Global Information Technology Report published by the World Economic Forum, and the founder of the annual Global Innovation Index published by the World Intellectual Property Organization.
His other books include: