J.E. Austin Associates, Inc. (JAA) was founded in 1986 for the purpose of assisting businesses, governments, non-profit organizations, educational and financial institutions, producer organizations, and other organizations around the world to improve productivity, to enhance competitiveness, to strengthen management and strategy implementation, and to facilitate economic development.

JAA is a leader in improving the competitiveness of countries, sectors, and businesses. JAA has a suite of analytical tools, including the Porter Diamond, that it uses to ground-truth industry strategies for repositioning themselves in global markets and for fostering public-private dialogue supporting increased productivity. JAA has industry-specific expertise in numerous sectors, including ICT, tourism, business process outsourcing, automotive, agro-food tech, creative industries, and textiles and apparel. JAA has worked closely for many years with Dr. Michael Porter, founder and director of the Harvard Business School Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness on projects related to country competitiveness and company and industry strategy. JAA’s President collaborated for five years on the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) Global Agenda Council on Competitiveness and served on the Board of Directors of The Competitiveness Institute for two years. JAA helped prepare the World Bank Clusters for Competitiveness manual including diagnostic tools for assessing cluster competitiveness and also introduced national competitiveness initiatives to the US and UK foreign assistance programs.