2024 ACES Ecosystem Ranking Report

The inaugural Ecosystem ranking was completed and released on October 7th, 2024 at Avant South. The ranking and report was a collaboration by the ACES colleges and led by Emory faculty members Dr. Zac Peskowitz, Joey Glasgow and Thomas Ottolin.

The report provides a detailed examination of Atlanta’s innovation ecosystem. We do this by comparing how Atlanta performs relative to other large cities in four key areas: higher education, workforce, business environment, and start-up ecosystem. By our metric, Atlanta ranks 11th among the top 30 most populous MSAs in the country.

Overall, Atlanta has many of the crucial, foundational elements to work towards becoming a top five innovation city. Its higher education institutions produce skilled workers that tend to remain in the area, and the business environment is friendly to those who go on to start their own companies. Additionally, with initiatives like ACES and resources at universities and beyond, it is clear that the city will continue grow its entrepreneurial environment. The city can find more ways to develop the relationships between its academic institutions and industry leaders to create a more synergistic environment where cutting-edge research is the foundation of entrepreneurship.

To become a top 5 tech hub, we need to align on where we rank today and how to improve. To do so we will:

Engage researchers of multiple institutions and disciplines to establish a credible, holistic “ranking”.

Adopt common language and metrics to monitor the health and productivity of ATL as a tech hub.

Support ongoing data collection from ecosystem stakeholders and publish an annual report to assess the impact of initiatives and heighten our profile.