SSTI Digest

July 293:00 p.m. EDTFree

Please join us for the Innovation Finance subcommunity meeting where we will discuss Innovation Finance 101. This meeting is intended to be the first in a series of foundational conversations on innovation finance and will focus on the terminology, process, and structure of venture capital investment. Register here. 

August 122:00 p.m. EDTFree

The Lab-to-Market subcommunity meeting occurs every 2nd Tuesday at 2:00 p.m. Eastern time)

The August discussion will focus on the national and regional ecosystems for moving technologies out of the laboratory to create new products, companies, and jobs. Come prepared to share about initiatives in your region: What’s working and what’s not? How have you worked around bottlenecks in the process? Register here.

The New York City Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC) recently announced that it is awarding Fordham University $3 million from its Greenlight Innovation Fund. The university will also receive additional funds, including a $1.1 million grant from Councilman Oswald Feliz, to create the Bronx Green Job Center (BGJC), a workforce development and entrepreneurship hub that aims to create an equitable green-job pipeline in the Bronx. BGJC’s programs and services are expected to support workforce development initiatives in the green economy. Its workforce development programs are set to launch in the Fall of 2026.

The overlap between applicants and recipients of the three large regional innovation approaches attempted by the federal government so far continues with the July 9, 2025, NSF narrowing of the field for the second NSF Regional Innovation Engines competition to 29 semifinalists across the country. Predominantly with teams led by universities and university affiliates (25 of the 29 selections), the contenders include 17 NSF Engines Development Awards teams who received two-year planning grants in 2023 and early 2024 that they leveraged to help build coalitions and refine visions for dynamic innovation ecosystems within their regions. It also includes regions that have served as EDA Tech Hubs designees, Tech Hub winners, and recipients of Building Better Regions Phase I and/or Phase II awards.

Seventy-one teams engaged in this round of the competition. One may view a map of the 29 new NSF Engines semifinalists here.

Please note: this article is not intended as a comprehensive review of Public Law No. 119-21, nor should our reading of the law be treated as tax or legal advice.

Now that the dust has settled on the federal budget reconciliation package, Public Law No: 119-21, SSTI presents to its Digest readership our look at the legislation from a technology-based economic development (TBED) perspective. The process nuances, potential fiscal impacts, and broad policy changes of the 870-page act have been extensively covered elsewhere, so we won’t rehash those here. Instead, we will focus on a few key highlights of changes to the tax code and what those could mean for TBED activities.

Over the past 40 years, many people involved in SBIR and empirical analysts in the research, finance, and technology sectors have said SBIR awardees, as a group, are uniquely important for America’s innovation goals. Research presented in a recent NBER working paper provides further evidence backing up those claims and reveals SBIR companies may be preferable for innovation productivity and efficiency—particularly for advancing strategic national, social and environmental goals—to innovation-oriented companies simply backed by venture capital, the finance instrument most often tracked for evidence of innovation success or progress.

SSTI has updated its Key Technology Area Investment Data Tool with new and refreshed data spanning January 1, 2013, through June 30, 2025. The tool comprises two interactive visuals and uses Pitchbook technology verticals selected to align with many of the key technology focus areas (KTFAs) defined in the CHIPS and Science Act of 2022 (CHIPS). The tool breaks down the number of investment-backed companies, investment deals, and amount of capital invested by each state, year (2013-2025H1), and investment stage (e.g., seed, angel, venture).

For this update, data through June 30, 2025, were downloaded on July 1, 2025, and built into the provided visualizations on the data tool webpage.

Note that because many investment deals are not subject to disclosure, it is difficult to immediately identify investment activity, often leading to data for more recent years being less complete. This potential for incomplete data is a critical issue to consider when exploring data from the first half of 2025 and other recent periods.

The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) is requesting information from the public to help shape potential future updates to its Key Technology Focus Areas (KTFAs). NSF’s KTFAs directly influence and shape innovation- and economic development-related programs. For example, KTFAs have been important factors in the Economic Development Administration’s (EDA) Regional Technology and Innovation Hubs (Tech Hubs) and NSF’s Regional Innovation Engines (Engines) programs which require regions to advance a critical technology area that already has traction in their region.

In 2024, nearly 628,000 job postings demanded at least one AI skill, according to research from the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta’s Center for Workforce and Economic Opportunity. The research also revealed that the percentage of all job postings requiring at least one AI skill increased from approximately 0.5% in 2010 to 1.7% in 2024. These numbers, however, do not inform workforce development practitioners or workers selecting training programs about which levels of education produce the most in-demand workers entering the AI-dominated workforce, nor do they indicate which occupations at what level of educational attainment have increasing demand for these skills. To provide these insights, the Fed researchers conducted an examination of the growth in employer demand for AI skills, analyzing online job posting data from 2010 to 2024. 

Patents serve as a powerful tool that promotes the disclosure and diffusion of new innovations while allowing inventors an exclusive period to commercialize and profit from the technology. The U.S., while a hub for innovation and a leader in patents, has experienced stagnation in the growth of Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) applications and USPTO-granted utility patents in recent years. Ever since 2021, China has surpassed the U.S. in PCT applications, and more than half of all USPTO utility patents are owned by foreign entities, including Japan and the European Union. 

This edition of Useful Stats explores U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) and PCT patent data compiled from the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics and data from the Business Enterprise R&D (BERD) survey. These data provide a background for how the patent landscape across the U.S. has changed over the past few decades.

If you are an entrepreneurship service organization (ESO), you likely are seeing more companies within your scope adopting artificial intelligence (AI). But how well do you understand their needs for further assistance with the transformative platform technology? A recent report from the Initiative for a Competitive Inner City (ICIC), “How small business owners are learning, using, and navigating challenges with AI tools,” sheds light on what your companies may be experiencing and offers some recommendations. The findings are based on 3,752 business owners nationwide who responded to an ICIC survey, as well as five focus groups.

Two recent research reports, one from Georgetown University's Center on Education and the Workforce (CEW) and another from Ivy Tech Community College, in collaboration with TEConomy Partners, LLC, focus on credential shortages that are keeping many jobs that don't require a bachelor's degree unfilled.

The Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s (ASPI) report, ASPI’s two-decade CriticalTechnology Tracker: The rewards of long-term research investment, aims to identifywhich countries and institutions are leading in high-impact research across 64 criticaltechnological domains, including defense, space, energy, environment, artificialintelligence, biotechnology, robotics, cyber, computing, advanced materials, andquantum technologies. The tracker's methodology involves analyzing the top 10% ofhighly cited research publications in each critical technology. According to ASPI, thisapproach emphasizes research that significantly influences the technological lifecycleand is likely to lead to patents and breakthroughs. The dataset spans from 2003 to2023, allowing for both short-term (five-year) and long-term (21-year) trend analyses. The report’s key finding is a change in global leadership. Data from the first five years