Professor Jean-Pierre Jeannet is a native of Switzerland where he completed his basic education. Prior to pursuing graduate studies in the United States, he worked in banking in Switzerland and in New York.

Professor Jeannet earned an MBA and a Ph.D. in Business Administration from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. As Professor of Marketing and International Business at Babson College, he has served on the Babson faculty since 1974 and held the Walter H. Carpenter Chair for the period 1990–1995. Babson appointed him in 1995 to the F.W. Olin Distinguished Professorship in Global Business where he acted in the role of Director of the William F. Glavin Center for Global Management (until 2006) as well as Director of the Europe Institute (2002–2009). He was the first director of the Global Entrepreneurship Program (GEP) delivered jointly with EM Lyon (France) and Zhejiang University School of Management (Hangzhou, China).

Since 1981, he has been a member of the faculty of IMD (formerly IMEDE) in Lausanne, Switzerland, where he continues to return to teach and research. For years, he spent the fall and spring semesters at Babson and about five months of the year at IMD on a joint appointment as Professor of Global Marketing and Strategy (since 1992). At IMD, he taught in numerous executive programs and has acted as program director for many company-specific programs such as for Sulzer, DSM, Medtronic, Roche, Deloitte and WWL. Since 2010, he holds the title of Professor Emeritus.

Professor Jeannet was Visiting Lecturer at Keio Graduate School of Business in Tokyo, Japan, in 1980, and also at Zhejiang University School of Management, Hangzhou (2009), and at EM Lyon (2009).

At Babson, Professor Jeannet teaches Global Marketing Strategy and Global Strategic Management. He has actively participated in the development of various international components of the MBA curriculum, such as the IMIP Program, and Babson's offshore programs, and most recently the Global Entrepreneurship Program (GEP). He is also been active in Babson's executive programs for clients such as DSM, MerckSerono, Novartis, and SAP.

Professor Jeannet's research has been in the area of international and global marketing, global strategies, global thinking, strategic thinking, market orientation, and competitive marketing strategies. He has published many teaching cases and is author and co-author of several books, including Global Marketing Strategies (6th ed., 2004), Cases in International Marketing, Competitive Marketing Strategies in a European Context, Cases in Marketing Management, Managing with a Global Mindset (2000), and Global Key Account Management (2003). His most recent research has covered such issues as e business, building customer franchises, ingredient branding, and global account management, value chain marketing, and business modeling.

Professor Jeannet is an active consultant in management development, project consulting, and strategic planning with a number of international companies. His present and past clients include Siemens, Sulzer, SMH/Swatch, Nestle, Nokia, ICI, Zeneca, Lego, DSM, Deloitte, AVEBE, Serono, Novartis, UBS, NatWest/Coutts, Telekurs, Polaroid, Huntsman Chemical, Digital, SAP. and Bayer. His clients and assignments have spanned industrial, consumer, and service industries and he has carried out assignments in North America, Europe, Asia, and Latin America.

Professor Jeannet serves on the board of PubliGroupe, a international media company based in Switzerland, served on the advisory board of Swiss House, a Swiss-sponsored organization based in Boston that aims at connecting Switzerland with Boston (until 2008) and is President of EECH at Babson, and an advisor to Vinci Capital of Switzerland. He was an invited presenter to the 2000 World Economic Forum held in Davos and in the 2000 Emirates International Business Forum in Dubai, as well as to the World Sports Forum (2002) and the World Sports Conference (2004), and a Founding Member of the World Entrepreneurship Forum (since 2008).