Dr. Sacha Wunsch-Vincent heads the Global Innovation Index (GII) work within the Department for Economics and Data Analytics at WIPO and has acted as the GII Co-Editor since 2013. He joined WIPO in 2010 to help set up WIPO’s economics work under the Chief Economist. At WIPO, he is one of the main authors of the World Intellectual Property Report and the Global Innovation Index. His primary research foci and current area of work are concerned with the interaction of innovation, intellectual property, and economic development. As part of his work at WIPO he regularly conducts national innovation system assessments. He also regularly contribute to building domestic research and statistical capacity in developing countries, most recently in countries such as China, India, Egypt, Uganda. Most recently, he was charged with overseeing the WIPO project on “Leveraging Public Research for Innovation and Growth - An international Comparison of Knowledge Transfer Policies and Practices”.
Before joining WIPO, he was an Economist at the OECD Directorate for Science, Technology, and Industry for seven years. Earlier he was the Swiss National Science Fellow at the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology (University of California, Berkeley) and the Peterson Institute for International Economics (Washington, D.C.). He has served as advisor to organizations such as the World Bank and the World Economic Forum, and has testified before national governments and parliaments, mostly on copyright and innovation issues. Sacha sits on several editorial boards – including the International Journal of Innovation Studies - and is reviewer to a number of publications such as the Science and Engineering indicators Report of the US National Science Foundation. He has published a series of peer-reviewed and other journal articles and is the author of several books. Sacha just finished the book “Harnessing Public Research for Innovation in the 21st Century “ with Anthony Arundel and Suma Athreye, published by Cambridge University Press in 2021. In the same series he published a book on “The Informal Economy in Developing Nations: Hidden Engine of Innovation?” in 2016.
Sacha holds a Master of International Economics from the University of Maastricht with a Masters Thesis at MERIT and a PhD in Economics from the University of St. Gallen, Switzerland. He teaches International Economics at Sciences Po Paris, and the World Trade Institute in Bern.
He is Vice President of the Geneva Lake Water Rescue (Sauvetage de Genève).
