Professor Javier Santiso is ESADEgeos Vice-President and President of the OECD Emerging Markets Network (Emnet). He is the founder of the Start-Up Spain initiative, consisting of a series of events with entrepreneurs, venture capital funds and start-ups organised in conjunction with ESADE and Fundación Rafael del Pino. He is also founder of Club España 2020, which brings together the Spanish Argonauts, executives at foreign multinationals who work abroad. He also created forums on emerging markets known as the ESADE Globalisation Lab. He is the editor of the Annual Report on Sovereign Wealth Funds, published jointly by ESADEgeo, KPMG and Invest in Spain (ICEX). The first issue was published in 2012.

In 2009, he was elected as one of the Young Global Leaders (YGL) by the World Economic Forum (Davos). In 2011, he was named, along with a scientist and a blogger, as one of three most influential up-and-coming intellectuals in the Iberoamerican context, according to Foreign Policy magazine. He was again nominated among the top 50 most influential people in Ibero-America in 2012. He is a member of the global advisory board of the World Economic Forum and the Aspen Institute in France.