The Atlanta Competitive Advantage Conference (ACAC) is focused on developing a better understanding of the sources of sustained competitive advantage in market economies. The ACAC Research Development Workshop (RDW) improves the capabilities of emerging researchers working on questions in innovation, strategy, processes of new knowledge search, absorption and diffusion, and the measurement of the impact of innovation on firms and society. Open to late-stage PhD students, the RDW focuses on improving research projects that these students are currently undertaking in their home institutions. This is done by bringing together twenty-four PhD students with a range of scholarly foci and placing them with scholars from outside of their home institution and with whom they that would not otherwise work. By including program modules that address building networks among innovation researchers, the RDW helps the PhD students integrate more broadly into a global community of innovation research scholars across institutions. At the 9th ACAC RDW in 2012 twenty different US PhD programs, two Canadian PhD programs and four European PhD programs sent students to the workshop.
Broader Impacts: Within the US the impact of an improvement in our knowledge base with respect to the management and evaluation of innovation processes is significant. This impact will be felt across a wide range of organizations. In 2012 private, for-profit business in the US spent an estimated $280 billion on R&D. Government, academia and other non-profits combined for about another $130 billion. These numbers are expected to increase in 2013. With over $400 billion, being spent annually on innovation and new knowledge search in the US alone, any improvement in innovation outcomes through better managerial decision-making will have a significant, long-term impact on both economic competitiveness and on social welfare. Managers need to better understand the "how" and "why" aspects of the relationship between the firm's internal innovation and knowledge management activates and the firm's sustained competitive advantage that outputs can give in open markets. These same perspectives apply to not-for-profit and government organizations seeking innovation and change. Improvements in understanding will come only from organization-level decisions based on solid science. Thus, the better the science is behind the prescriptions given to managers for effective and efficient research and innovation processes, the greater the gains will be from those processes. It is in that light that this RDW focuses on impacting the quality of that science in the emerging researchers in the field.
