Meet Our
Fellows
Santiago Amador is a public innovator with over 25 years of experience leading public and social innovation. He is the founding director of iBO, Bogotá, Colombia’s public innovation lab. Under his leadership, iBO received a UN Public Service Award, and the lab’s tools and frameworks are now cited as global best practices. He also led Bogotá’s GovTech efforts as CEO of [ÁGATA], the Data Analytics and Artificial Intelligence Agency of Bogotá, and served as National Director of Technology Policies at Colombia’s Ministry of Information and Communication Technologies.
Amador has designed and implemented renowned initiatives, including the Democratic Innovation Lab for the Bogotá City Council. Amador also launched "Cinema Bus" to bring a mobile movie theater to small towns and rural areas of Colombia and co-founded LISA, a leadership and social innovation school for youth in marginalized communities, funded by USAID. He launched (DISEÑO PÚBLICO), a consultancy blending systems and design thinking, behavioral science, and data analytics.
He holds a law degree with a minor in anthropology from Universidad de Los Andes, a master's degree in public administration from the Harvard Kennedy School, and a master's in social sciences of the internet from the University of Oxford. He is a Faculty Associate at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for the Internet and Society and a professor of public innovation at Colombia’s National School of Public Administration.
As a Bloomberg Public Innovation Fellow, Amador will explore the concept of the "Augmented Public Servant" to understand how artificial intelligence can augment public servants’ capabilities in research, creative problem solving, and delivery.