Dr. Arash Hajikhani is a Research Team Leader in the Foresight and data economy area at VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland and Adjunct Professor at LUT University (Finland). Dr. Hajikhani's research focuses on innovation and technology management with a particular focus on quantitative and data-driven methods for measuring and assessing Science, Technology and Innovation (STI) systems. His prior research has been funded by the European Commission via H2020, Foundation for Economic Education, Research Foundation of Lappeenranta University of Technology. He worked as Visiting Scholar at The Scandinavian Consortium for Organizational Research facilitates, Stanford University and The Georgia Tech Scheller College of Business.

He has practical knowledge and ten years of working experience in utilizing data analytics methods such as text analytics, network analysis and machine learning to transform big data into valuable insight that benefits the decision-making processes. He has been working and publishing on various aspects of utilizing novel and large data sources to design informative metrics on economical, societal, and technological shifts. His work in promoting automated and algorithmic use of data for spotting technological change and innovation systems has been published in top-tier journals such as Scientometrics, Journal of Business Research, Association for Computing Machinery and Journal of Cleaner Production as well as open-source code repositories.