ACE has had a busy and productive summer, hosting the annual “Paper Development Bootcamp” on 17 to 19 December 2013 and the ACERE conference on 4 to 7 February 2014. The latter event was held in Sydney for the first time this year, co-hosted by the University of New South Wales. We have also had a string of well attended research seminars. Increasingly, we see colleagues from other universities coming to our seminars, which we much appreciate.
A string of international visitors have contributed to this high level of activity. Andreas Schwab, Iowa State University, USA and Visiting Senior Fulbright Scholar at the Institute of Technology Bandung, Indonesia, visited in December for the 2013 Bootcamp. Frederic Delmar, Lund University, Sweden; Kim Klyver, University of Southern Denmark, Denmark. and Carina Lomberg, University of Bern, Switzerland, all stayed with us for most of the summer months. Sabine Muller, Aarhus University, Denmark, and Joanne Larty, Lancaster University, UK, both visited the centre after ACERE, for 1 and 4 weeks, respectively. My former student and current CEO of the Association of Swedish Incubators and Science Parks, Magnus Lundin, paid a brief visit around which we organized a lunch with Brisbane-based practitioners in that space. Currently Semra Ascigil, Middle East Technical University, Turkey, is visiting us for 11 weeks on an Academic Staff Mobility Program and in April we will welcome a long term visitor, Tõnis Mets, University of Tartu, Estonia. Tõnis has received a prestigious Marie Curie Fellowship from the European Union, a grant worth over AUD $ 300,000. Jaehu Shim, our self-funded Post Doc from Korea, has decided to extend his visit for the duration of 2014.
In the new year we have already enjoyed considerable publication success. ACE Senior Research Fellow Rene Bakker has received final acceptance from Organization Science – one of the very top journals in management generally – for his article “Built to last or meant to end: Intertemporal choice in strategic alliance portfolios. Two other ACE researchers have informed me about conditional acceptances in very prestigious journals but wish to hold back disclosure until we have final acceptance. Two other articles have appeared in early 2014 issues: “Bricolage as a path to innovativeness for resource constrained new firms” by Julienne Senyard, Ted Baker, Paul Steffens and myself in Journal of Product Innovation Management, 31(2), 211–230, and “Shouting from the ivory tower: a marketing approach to improve communication of academic research to entrepreneurs” by Paul Steffens, Clinton Weeks, Lauren Isaak and myself in Entrepreneurship Theory And Practice, 38(2), 399-426. These mentioned are not a complete list of recent publications or acceptances, and we also have high hopes for additional manuscripts currently submitted to top tier, scholarly journal. Overall, the indication is that ACE is taking a further step up in international publishing, despite increasing competition from researchers all over the world.
As regards our engagement with practice we have increased our presence at local events such as, the StartUp Weekend at River City Labs, and the High-Growth Roundtable organized by Brisbane Marketing around the visit by Silicon Valley entrepreneur Adrian Turner, Chambers of Commerce. Further, the ACERE conference featured a special workshop on ‘Building Bridges between Academics, Practice and Policy: Lessons Learned from the Field’ organized by Inc. 500 serial entrepreneur Suresh Kumar. We have also released a number of practice-oriented reports from the CAUSEE project lead authored by ACE Research Fellow Scott Gordon and posted a number of new “research vignettes”. The ‘ACE research vignettes ” series features 2-page jargon-free research summaries on a range of entrepreneurship-related topics. For example, if you have an interest in small firm growth, you may want to check out this set of vignettes.
The centre has two PhD, one Research Masters, and one Graduate Diploma dissertations currently under examination. As these students complete their degrees, we welcome new research students: Jenna Campton, PhD; Graham Fellows, Master of Business (Research), Hridesh Gajurel, Master of Business (Research); Jan Gruenhagen, Master of Business Advanced. We are currently also recruiting a new Post-Doctoral fellow. We received 57 applications and hope to welcome our new co-worker early in the second half of 2014.
The centre will soon turn five years old and we will be subjected to internal review and negotiate our resources for future years. We will never rest on our laurels, but based on our achievements we feel confident the next few years will continue our upward trajectory in every respect. I hope you have enjoyed reading about our achievements!