Nearly every state legislature annually appropriates some level of funding to support research and development activities in the state's nonprofit, university, and industrial research communities. Few, though, have developed long-term, systematic attempts to measure the impact of those investments. Following a nearly ten-fold increase in the state's investment in research and development over the past six years, Maine legislators requested that the Maine Science & Technology Foundation (MSTF) conduct such an impact assessment.
MSTF has until July 2006 to answer three questions posed by the state legislature: