SSTI Digest

Conventional TBED wisdom for decades has been that small businesses generate more innovation in the United States. All big tech companies started as scrappy little companies in their respective eras of IT’s rapid growth. But there remains a long-running debate about whether large firms with financial resources and R&D capacity have an innovation advantage over smaller but more agile firms. Understanding the arguments for each side is important for policymakers and business leaders as they seek ways to support small and medium-sized enterprises and leverage the innovative capacity of larger corporations. In their paper, Firm Size and Innovative Performance: A Meta-Analysis Across 25 Years of Evidence, Federico Bachmann and Rodrigo Ezequiel Kataishi provide a comprehensive meta-analysis that synthesizes 25 years of research to clarify this relationship.  

As federal funding for science research decreases, it may be tempting to think that philanthropy might be able to fill the gap. However, a recent study from the Science Philanthropy Alliance illustrates that it cannot replace the robust funds that government allocation once contributed.  

Budget holes left by decreased government funding for scientific equipment and research could have thwarted, the planned construction of a radio telescope in Nevada, but advocates believe the project is well on its way to beating the odds. The “Deep Synoptic Array-2000" is an outgrowth of NSF funding and led by researchers at the California Institute of Technology (CalTech). The concept is to replicate the Arecibo telescope in Puerto Rico. That telescope collapsed in 2020.   …

The U.S. Departments of Labor, Commerce, and Education (the departments) released a strategy for workforce development with six overarching themes: industry-driven strategies, worker mobility, integrated systems, accountability, flexibility, and innovation. The plan was written in response to an April 2025 directive from the White House mandating an overhaul of the federal approach to supporting workforce training.  …

Overall, the trends identified in SSTI’s Q1 2025 analysis continue. While funding levels continue their upward trajectory, the influence of AI mega deals on total VC market activity persists (see 8/14/2025 Digest article). The trend of investment activity moving away from smaller transactions and toward larger deals also continues. These movements in investor deal preference may be persistent enough to necessitate that some TBED organizations evaluate their existing portfolios and prospective pipelines to determine if there are structural risks to companies’ abilities to secure sufficient capital, continue operations, and successfully meet their goals and those of the TBED organization in supporting the firms.  …

With federal research budgets under pressure and other nations accelerating their scientific investments, the U.S. faces critical choices about where to direct limited funds. Does concentrating resources in leading institutions best sustain discovery, or would broader geographic diffusion strengthen the nation’s overall research ecosystem? And, while discoveries are usually attributed to individual scientists or teams, the role played by research institutions in shaping where and how breakthroughs occur is not as well understood.  An academic research team recently explored these questions.  …

To grow their local populations and STEM workforce, communities across the country are experimenting with resident/worker attraction programs, as we have previously covered. But how effective are these programs? A recent study from the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research offers new insights by analyzing Tulsa Remote’s track record from its inception in 2018 to 2023.   Tulsa Remote, launched in 2018 with funding from the George Kaiser Family Foundation, provides $10,000 to eligible remote workers who relocate to Tulsa and commit to stay for at least one year. According to their 2024 economic impact report, Tulsa Remote has attracted 3,475 remote workers, with 96% completing their one-year requirement and 70% continuing to live in Tulsa. The program spends roughly $15,000 per participant, including the incentive, administrative costs, and community benefits such as access to co-working spaces and other networking activities.  The study focuses on what economists call the “but for” rate or the percentage of program participants who wouldn’t have moved to Tulsa without the incentive. Using administrative data from Tulsa Remote combined with…

Sixty-eight percent of business leaders polled for the Q4 2024 KPMG AI Quarterly Pulse Survey1 were planning to invest between $50-$250 million in GenAI over the next 12 months. Considering the investments companies are making in AI, shouldn’t the adoption rate be much higher? Apparently not. A new study from a team of researchers associated with M.I.T.’s Media Lab, covered in a New Yorker article, reports, “(d)espite $30-$40 billion in enterprise investment into GenAI … 95% of organizations are getting zero return.’”  …

A recent executive order from the White House aims to centralize federal grantmaking. This revamping of the grantmaking process would affect how decisions are made regarding the distribution of billions of dollars in research grants and have a significant impact on research universities.  While the order notes, “nothing in this order shall be construed to discourage or prevent the use of peer review methods,” it sidelines the peer review process with the disclaimer, “provided that peer review recommendations remain advisory” to the senior appointees. These senior appointees are directed to “use their independent judgment.”  All final grant award decisions across all agencies are to be made by political appointees. 

The U.S. Economic Development Administration (EDA) recently notified the FY24 Build to Scale (B2S) competition applicants that it has canceled the FY24 competition and will announce a new B2S competition in early 2026. According to the announcement, Secretary Lutnick has directed EDA to restart a new B2S competition that better aligns with the goals of the current administration. …

After eliminating funding for many energy projects underway totaling several billions of dollars, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) states its intention to make new awards from a pool of $1 billion exclusively focused on projects to advance and scale mining, processing, and manufacturing technologies across key stages of the critical minerals and materials supply chains. The Notices of Funding Opportunities (NOFOs) are not open yet for four of the five programs; awards for the fifth will be announced this fall. The advance notice for planned NOFOs is to give potential applicants extra time to consider the design and structure of their potential proposals.  …

The dominance of artificial intelligence (AI) investments in venture capital (VC) has been a consistent storyline in the first half of 2025. PitchBook, Carta, Crunchbase, and many others have all pointed to the significant portion of investment dollars and deals flowing to AI companies. With the volume of companies, deals, and dollars involved, it is more than a spike in the usual cyclic nature of  VC investment.   As SSTI wrote in our review of Q1 venture capital investment activity, VC has been concentrating in larger deals. With market trends and mega deals in AI so well documented, we explore investment concentration from  deal size and geographic perspectives. As with prior analyses, we focus on deal sizes more relevant to TBED initiatives to help regional innovation leaders identify where they might find opportunities, face challenges, or set priorities in such a dynamic environment. Excluding the largest deals from our analysis appears to be increasing important, considering  PitchBook’s findings that just ten companies accounted for 41% of all venture dollars so far this year.