Thomas Andersson, Prof. Ph.D

Thomas Andersson, Prof. Ph.D, is a senior expert on issues of innovation policy, the knowledge economy and smart city development. He is the president of the International Organisation for Knowledge Economy and Enterprise Development (IKED). Current engagements include international projects linking of smart cities in Europe, Asia and the Middle East around pioneering methods to boost the adoption by citizens of new solutions in response to outstanding social and environmental issues. In this context, he serves as an invited international expert of the Chinese Society for Urban Study (CSUS) for pilot testing and standardization of the smart city context in China.

He has been a member of four ad hoc high level expert groups to the European Commission, on “Scientific Data e-Infrastructures“, “The Role of Community Research Policy in the Knowledge-based Economy”, “World Class Research Infrastructures”, and “Prioritisation Procedure for New Research Infrastructure”. He chaired the Global Identity Networking of Individuals (GINI), a support action for the Information Society and Media Directorate- General, European Commission, and was engaged by the European Commission as a peer expert on large-scale research projects.

Among other assignments, Thomas Andersson is chairman of the board for the International Entrepreneurship Academy (Intentac) and of the International University of the Entrepreneurship and Technology Association (IUET), the Swedish partner institute of the Centre for Global Competitiveness and Performance Framework for Cooperation, World Economic Forum, Geneva. He previously served as senior advisor of the Research Council of the Sultanate of Oman, and as a member of its international advisory board, and was the main expert of the Executive Council of Abu Dhabi on innovation and benchmarking natural resource-based economies. Recently he was responsible for the main chapter of UNCTAD’s science, technology and innovation policy (STIP) review of Iran.

In previous years, he was President of Jönköping University, Vice Chairman of Division XI of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Science (IVA) on education and research policy, and Deputy Director of Science Technology and Industry at the OECD, where he led the Structural Policies Branch and coordinated the technology part of the Jobs Study and also the Growth Study. Further, co-founder and responsible for the joint OECD-World Bank program on Building Knowledge-Based Economies, he was responsible in the OECD for the first policy review carried out jointly with the World Bank, which addressed Korea’s transition to a Knowledge-based Economy.

Thomas Andersson received his PhD from the Stockholm School of Economics in 1989, where he became Associate Professor in 1993. He became full Professor of International Economics and Industrial Organisation at Jönköping International Business School (JIBS) in 2004, and has been a Visiting Fellow at Harvard University, Bank of Japan, Hitotsubashi University, and the University of Sao Paulo.