SSTI Digest

As a percentage, Silicon Valley has lost more jobs over the past four years than any U.S. metropolitan area since 1939, but evidence shows the region is stabilizing with a return to levels reminiscent of the late 1990s. Funding for venture capital is up, per capita income is increasing, and research and development funding has reached new highs. Yet, the region's most striking feature of late is, perhaps, the way it is growing, according to the 2005 Index of Silicon Valley.

The index, recently released by Joint Venture: Silicon Valley, shows the state of the region's economy is a muddled picture depending on how far back one goes to measure it. Since 2004, the results are positive, but medium-term-and-beyond comparisons reveal sharp declines. If one benchmarks the region against pre-dot.com levels, then it would appear the Valley has "resumed an incremental pattern of growth," the authors say.

NBIA Releases Revised Business Incubation Guide The National Business Incubation Association (NBIA) last week released an updated version of its business incubation manual. The revised second edition of A Comprehensive Guide to Business Incubation includes 71 chapters geared toward helping small businesses grow and offers the advice of more than 200 incubation professionals. The guide is divided into four main sections: fundamentals of incubator development, best practices in incubator management, working with clients, and special topics in business incubation. To purchase a copy, visit the NBIA online bookstore at http://www.nbia.org/store.

Real estate developer Robert Klein II was selected as chairman of California's stem cell oversight committee.

Foundations and philanthropists are playing increasingly important financial roles for many academic and regional technology-based economic development (TBED) efforts. The latest issue of Philanthropy News Digest, the weekly electronic newsletter of the FoundationCenter, highlights three recent announcements that provide examples of the size, scope and opportunity presented by these types of awards. The announcements are summarized below.

For many university tech transfer operations, the need to generate revenues to support the office and attempt to meet the often pie-in-the-sky expectations of school administrators can force licensing efforts toward only the biggest deals. Thanks to a large donation to serve as an endowment, the University of Southern California (USC) Viterbi School of Engineering will be able to count on $1 million in interest income to support its technology transfer activities.

Dr. John Reed, president and CEO of The Burnham Institute, was appointed to the Independent Citizen's Oversight Committee that will govern the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine created last month.

Just as SSTI and other post-election analysts predicted, California’s recent passage of a $3 billion commitment to stem cell research is triggering responses from across the country. Wisconsin is the first to outline a specific, strategic reaction to the California referendum in an effort to retain or regain momentum in the race to encourage bio-based economic growth.

Wisconsin Gov. Jim Doyle announced last week his plans to invest nearly $750 million in state funds to support biotechnology, health sciences and stem cell research. According to Gov. Doyle, the two states are not in competition; rather, he suspects there will be a synergy between them.

"Wisconsin can’t match California dollar for dollar, but California can’t match what Wisconsin already has - including the best scientists in the world and first class research institutions," Gov. Doyle said.

Using data from its 2004 Best Performing Cities Index, Milken has generated a comprehensive table ranking cities by one- and five-year measurements of job growth, wages and salaries, and relative high tech gross domestic product (GDP) growth, and other measurements.

SSTI would like to draw readers' attention to one of those other measurements, Milken's high-tech GDP location quotient (LQ), which may be of some value to the tech-based economic development community. LQ is defined as a measure of high-tech concentration, with the U.S. given a value of 1.0. For the Milken study, metro areas having an LQ higher than 1.0 are said to be more concentrated in high tech sectors than the U.S.

What policies, investments and programs would be most effective for communities trying to attract, retain or build a local pharmaceutical industry? Research parks? Tax incentives? Biotech seed capital funds?

The answers one gets will vary, but using historical data on patent activity and observing the location of the largest pharmaceutical companies, a group of researchers suggests investments in academic R&D that lead to publications is not a bad place to start.

Duane Roth is the new executive director of UCSD CONNECT. Roth was CEO of Alliance Pharmaceuticals in San Diego.

While the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) have voiced caution and funded efforts to understand the potential societal and environmental implications of nanotechnology deployment, both agencies announced much larger funding commitments - totaling $213 million - to expedite commercial applications for the explosive field.

Nanotech Solutions for Cancer Carrying a federal five-year price tag of $144.3 million, the NIH's National Cancer Institute (NCI) is forming the NCI Alliance for Nanotechnology in Cancer, a comprehensive, integrated initiative encompassing researchers, clinicians, and public and private organizations that have joined forces to develop and translate cancer-related nanotechnology research into clinical practice.

More than half since recession "officially" ended There is little comforting news in a new statistical report for workers in the U.S. information and communication technologies (ICT) sector. Researchers from the University of Illinois-Chicago found the sector lost 403,300 jobs between March 2001 and April 2004.

A staggering 200,000 of the high-wage jobs were lost since the recession was officially declared over in November 2001, making the notion of a jobless recovery a significant understatement for the sector.

The resilience of the regional ICT sectors and the overall economies of the seven profiled metropolitan areas are being tested with the incredible losses suffered since the bubble burst in March 2001. The following list presents the percentage change in total ICT employment between March 2001 and April 2004 for the seven primary metropolitan statistical areas (PMSA):