SSTI Digest

[Update Oct. 1] Editor’s note: On Sept. 23, the Biden campaign announced a “Small Business and Entrepreneurship Advisory Council.” A description has been added to the “Small Business” section of this article.

The Democratic Party officially nominated Joe Biden as their candidate for president this week. Despite just taking this first step into the general election, the former vice president has already announced numerous policy proposals. Using statements from the campaign website as a resource, the following is an overview of his science and innovation proposals.

The Biden campaign currently presents these proposals without any formal indication of prioritization. Clearly, the volume of policies suggests that acting on all of them would be challenging. SSTI will provide updates if Biden releases additional plans or provides a better indication of his priorities within these existing proposals.

A new Community College Growth Engine Fund is being launched by Education Design Lab to help mitigate the growing skills gap and strengthen community colleges as drivers of innovation between education and employment. Education Design Lab is a national nonprofit that designs, implements and scales new learning models for higher education and the future of work.  With funding from national philanthropies and in partnership with the League for Innovation in the Community College, they will engage a national cohort of community colleges and systems to partner with employers and regional stakeholders. Together they plan to create new pathways to economic mobility and help low-wage and entry-level workers advance into roles that pay at least median wage.

The innovation community has been on the front lines in responding to the current pandemic, and one area that has stepped up is the community makerspace. A new report from the Urban Manufacturing Alliance (UMA) highlights several of those efforts. As UMA points out, COVID-19 brought a renewed need for manufacturing capabilities, and makerspaces stepped into new roles. UMA’s report, Makerspaces In Action: A Community-Based Response to the Pandemic, focuses on four makerspaces that are contributing to response and recovery. As noted in the brief, those highlighted just scratch the surface of how makerspaces are responding, but the brief overview gives a glimpse into the role that the innovation space can play when it connects with the local community.

Improved prospects for economic development, as opposed to concerns about government efficiency, can play an important role in building support for local government consolidation efforts. The importance of economic opportunities in government consolidation was a key conclusion within Ball State University’s recently published policy brief, Indiana’s Government Modernization Act & Local Government Consolidation Experiences: Process and Politics. The brief examined seven consolidation efforts that occurred in Indiana between 2008 and 2012 and explored the preexisting conditions of the areas.

While each consolidation attempt had unique variables, Ball State’s report did reveal several common elements. Contrary to previously held beliefs, consolidation processes are not necessarily born out of a crisis climate; some were found to be the product of a consensus between two governments to find new ways of solving their shared problems.

Six organizations — including SSTI members Catalyst Connection and the Ohio Development Services Agency — have been designated to lead the new defense manufacturing community consortia. The Office of Economic Adjustment (OEA) has announce that these organizations are now eligible to enter the next phase of development and submit their requests for technical assistance, grants, and other support services. The Defense Manufacturing Community Support Program (DMCSP) was authorized in the 2019 National Defense Authorization Act as a new program offered by OEA. It is designed to make long-term investments in critical skills, facilities, research and development, and small business support in order to strengthen the national security innovation base by designating and supporting consortiums as defense manufacturing communities. Click here to view the list of designees and the fields/industries they intend to develop in their communities.

As the global economy continues to struggle through the COVID-19 pandemic, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has released an interactive online tool for discovering success stories of small business innovation and entrepreneurship. Showcasing several of the businesses that have successfully leveraged NIH small business funding — totaling more than $1 billion annually — to develop healthcare products and services, NIH’s Small Business Education and Entrepreneurial Development (SEED) office hopes that the tool will inspire others to start businesses and develop their technologies.

The tool allows users to search for companies based on the stage of development, funding institute, women and minority owned business, and others. Highlighting companies that have successfully developed, or are developing, new technologies will also inform potential investors and venture capitalists about the importance of NIH in strengthening companies and their technologies as they move towards commercialization.

The House has now passed 10 of the 12 annual appropriations bills for FY 2021. Within the total funding is support for key innovation priorities, including $35 million for EDA’s Build-to-Scale (i.e., Regional Innovation Strategies), $6 million for SBA’s innovation clusters program and $4 million for Federal and State Technology Partnerships (FAST). SSTI’s Innovation Advocacy Council had made expanding funding for each of these initiatives a priority for the year.

Science and innovation highlights within the House FY 2021 budget include the following:

Missouri Gov. Mike Parson last week announced that $1 million of the state’s CARES Act funding will be used to create a grant for nonprofit and university-based coworker and incubator facilities. The grant will be administered by the Missouri Technology Corporation (MTC). Organizations will be reimbursed with grant funds for expenses related to updating the facilities to encourage social distancing, adopting enhanced sanitation protocols or acquiring PPE to comply with the guidelines of the public health emergency. More information about the program can be found here.

A recent report from the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation examined the changing makeup of entrepreneurship over the period of 1996 to 2019, finding that older people, immigrants, and minorities are becoming new entrepreneurs at increasing rates. The report pulls from data collected for the foundation’s Indicators of Early-Stage Entrepreneurship series, and examines the trends in race and ethnicity, age, and immigration among new entrepreneurs.

The report highlights three findings:

More than 500 colleges and universities nationwide showed warning signs in a stress test that was conducted before the pandemic according to a new series of reports by the Hechinger Report and NBC News. Declining enrollment and decreased state government support had left dozens of universities under financial stress. With the added pressures of the coronavirus pandemic, “the fabric of American higher education as become even more strained,” the report says.

The Hechinger Report created a financial fitness tracker examining key metrics including enrollment, tuition revenue, public funding and endowment health among 2,662 schools that were included in the analysis. In addition to the more than 500 schools that showed warning signs in two or more metrics, the analysis found an uneven distribution of problems with Ohio and Illinois combined having more than 10 percent of all the institutions potentially facing trouble.

The importance of higher education institutions in helping rural communities build innovation-based ecosystems has been detailed in a report released by the Center on Rural Innovation. Higher Ed’s Key Role In Rural Innovation Ecosystems profiles 10 colleges and universities that have been engaged in their area’s innovation environment and explores what techniques each institution has found most useful in building that ecosystem.

While each college and university has a different roadmap toward building their area’s innovation environment, the Center on Rural Innovation found four primary categories that play an important part in higher ed’s contributions to building rural innovation and tech-based ecosystems:

A leading technology association has stepped up to positively impact tech diversity and inclusion through a new challenge that aims to double the percentage of the state’s Black and Latinx tech workers — currently at 5 and 7 percent respectively — by the end of the decade. The Mass Technology Leadership Council (MassTLC) launched a 2030 Challenge earlier this week that also will continue to work towards gender parity in the state’s tech workforce.