SSTI Digest

Over the last month, the Economic Development Administration (EDA) announced over $8 million in grants to expand entrepreneurial and business support services in Alabama, New York, and Texas including: $2.9 million to PortAL – a business incubator in Mobile, AL –  to renovate and modernize the former Threaded Fasteners building to provide entrepreneurial support services and house tech startups; $2.6 million to High Tech Rochester to facilitate the development of the Rochester-Finger Lakes Business Accelerator Hub Facility that will provide incubator space for high-growth potential startup businesses as well as services for existing manufacturing companies; $2 million to the University of Alabama (UA) to expand the UA Economic Development Resource Center in Tuscaloosa that provides economic development outreach services to businesses, governments, and citizens of Alabama; and, $1.3 million to the University of Houston to establish a Community Innovation Center that will support workforce training and entrepreneurship programming to the surrounding community.

Researchers of American entrepreneurship now have a timelier socio-economic portrait of the nation’s employer-owned businesses as a result of a public-private partnership between the U.S. Census Bureau, the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Minority Business Development Agency, and the Kauffman Foundation. Last week, data from the first Annual Survey of Entrepreneurs were made publicly available, which provides a detailed picture of the American entrepreneur in 2014 by examining race, ethnicity, gender, and geography. A brief released by the Census Bureau notes that more than 480,000 firms with paid employees (roughly 8.9 percent) of the 5.4 million U.S. firms with paid employees in 2014 had been in business for less than two years, according to the recent Annual Survey of Entrepreneurs data. Approximately 17.5 percent of all employer firms – nearly 950,000 – were minority owned, according to the survey. The $1.1 trillion in receipts generated by these minority-owned firms, however, accounted for just 3.3 percent of total receipts for all employer firms. Of minority-owned employer firms, 12.9 percent had been in business for two years or less, while…

Immigrant entrepreneurs would be allowed to remain in the United States for an initial period of up to two years, and, conditional upon meeting certain benchmarks, could potentially stay in the country for one additional period of up to three years under a newly proposed rule by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) branch of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS). As part of the International Entrepreneur Rule, which is now open for a 45-day comment period, certain international entrepreneurs would have an opportunity to start or scale their businesses in the United States.   In an official blog post by White House Office of Science and Technology Policy Deputy Director for Technology and Innovation Tom Kalil and Assistant Director for Entrepreneurship Doug Rand, the authors note that the new reform would propose clear criteria to identify those entrepreneurs with the potential to provide significant public benefit to the United States. Evaluating entrepreneurs on a case-by-case basis, the proposed rule would consider factors such as: the entrepreneur’s ownership stake (at least 15 percent) and leadership role in the startup; the…

The U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA), and its federal partners, announced the winners of its third annual Growth Accelerator Fund Competition on August 31. The 68 winners in 32 states and the District of Columbia were judged by more than 100 experts from both the public and private sector with entrepreneurial, investment, startup, economic development, capital formation and academic backgrounds. The competition consisted of two panel reviews, the first involving over 400 applications and presentations to establish a pool of 200 qualified finalists. Of those 200 finalists, a second panel evaluated presentations and pitch videos before selecting the final 68 winning organizations. Each winner will receive a cash prize of $50,000 from the fund’s $3.4 million to boost the economic impact of accelerators across the country. The purpose of the SBA’s annual competition is to draw attention and funding to parts of the country where there are gaps in the entrepreneurial ecosystem, including those not readily supported by the private sector. The newest awardees join SBA’s 200 past winning entrepreneurial ecosystems that form the foundation of the Growth…

The Department of Energy (DOE) recently announced that 43 small businesses had been selected to participate in the second round of its Small Business Voucher (SBV) pilot project, and was collectively awarded more than $8 million for a wide range of R&D clean energy, public-private sector innovation activities. The winning businesses will have the opportunity to collaborate with 12 DOE labs, as well as access to world class facilities and expert advice from renowned scientists and engineers to bring their clean energy technologies to market. The DOE laboratories scheduled to work with the awardees will offer their support and resources to commercialize clean energy techs involving advanced manufacturing, bioenergy, buildings, fuel cells, geothermal, solar, vehicles and water. Nearly $15 million in SBVs have been awarded in Rounds 1 and 2. The first SBV pilot took place in the fall of 2015 and involved 33 small businesses. Information involving Round 3 of the SBV program is expected to be released in October.

The Economic Development Administration (EDA), the Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC), and the Department of Labor’s Employment and Training Administration (ETA) have announced $38.8 million in funding as a part of the Obama administration’s Partnerships for Opportunity and Workforce and Economic Revitalization (POWER) Initiative – a coordinated federal effort to align, leverage and target a range of federal economic and workforce development programs and resources to assist communities negatively impacted by global transition away from coal.  In addition to $38.8 million in federal support, the federal partners anticipate that POWER investments will help coal-impacted communities leverage an additional $67 million from other public and private partners. Projects will address one or more of four goals including to: Diversify the commercial and industrial base of local and regional economies; Create jobs in new and/or existing industries; Attract new sources of private and public investment; and, Provide a range of workforce services and skills training for high-quality, in-demand jobs. Thanks to a partnership with ARC, a limited…

Opportunities for successful workforce development partnerships exist across a variety of industries and geographies, according to a recently released report from the Community Development Department at the Cleveland Fed.  The report, Addressing Employment Needs through Sector Partnerships, includes five case studies from throughout the Federal Reserve’s Fourth District, which contains Western Pennsylvania, Eastern Kentucky, the panhandle of West Virginia and all of Ohio. Although sector-based initiatives have been around for quite some time, the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act, whose final regulations became publicly available in June 2016, places a strong emphasis on aligning education and job training with employer needs, according to the report’s authors Kyle Fee, Matt Klesta, and Lisa Nelson. Using numerous interviews to conduct their research, each case study highlights how initiatives are structured and operated so that they identify and meet the needs of both employers and jobseekers. The case studies are: Addressing the Needs of Health Care Employers: Tri-County Health Care Industry Partnership; Building a Pipeline of IT Talent in…

Startup activity in the United States has increased for the second straight year after declining throughout the Great Recession and the years that followed, according to a newly updated index from the Kauffman Foundation. The metropolitan areas with the highest levels in 2016 Kauffman Index of Startup Activity are Austin, Miami, and Los Angeles. Among large states, the most startup activity according to the 2016 index were in Texas, Florida, and California, while Montana, Nevada, and Wyoming had the highest levels among smaller states. The 2016 Kauffman Index of Startup Activity is comprised of three equally weighted proxies: Rate of New Entrepreneurs, which measures the percentage of the U.S. adult population that became entrepreneurs, on average, in a given month; Opportunity Share of New Entrepreneurs, calculated as the percentage of new entrepreneurs driven primarily by "opportunity" vs. "necessity" – with necessity entrepreneurs defined as those who were previously unemployed and looking for a job; and, Startup Density, which is defined as the number of new employer businesses normalized by total business population. Nationally,…

A popular development strategy at the state and regional level, incubators seek to support economic growth by providing entrepreneurs with business assistance, access to capital, and networking. As of 2012, approximately one-third of the 1,250 business incubators in the United States were connected with universities, up from one-fifth in 2006, according to International (formerly National) Business Incubation Association data featured in The New York Times. Despite the proliferation of these programs at universities, there have been relatively few conclusions to date on the impacts of these incubators beyond anecdotes. Recent research from faculty at the University of Central Florida (UCF), however, finds evidence that firms in university incubators experience positive growth in number of employees and sales at a statistically significant rate compared to non-university incubated firms. On average, the authors find that university incubated firms were responsible for 3.965 more jobs than non-university incubated firms. In April’s volume of The Journal of Technology Transfer, five UCF researchers – Vernet Lasrado, Stephen Sivo, Cameron Ford, Thomas O’…

The big data technology and services market is expected to grow at a compound annual rate of 23.1 percent over the 2014-2019 forecast period, with annual spending projected to reach$48.6 billion in 2019, according to a 2015 study from IDC – a market research firm. Hoping to leverage this exponential growth into research and economic development opportunity, several universities are fund raising to establish new big data R&D Centers in the communities they serve. The results are mixed so far: while big data center projects at universities in Massachusetts, Nebraska, and Nevada are seeing significant progress, the University of Akron’s proposed Center for Data Science, Analytics and Information Technology will be shuttering its doors before it ever opened. On August 17, Gov. Charlie Baker announced Massachusetts will make a four-year, $5 million investment in the University of Massachusetts Amherst’s (UMass) Data Science/Cybersecurity Research and Education Collaborative – a public-private partnership designed to accelerate data science innovation in the Pioneer Valley region of Western Massachusetts. The state funding is intended to…

The National Science Foundation (NSF) is entertaining proposals to support “academe-industry partnerships, which are led by an interdisciplinary academic research team collaborating with at least one industry partner in order to carry out research to advance, adapt, and integrate technology(ies) into a specified, human-centered smart service system.” Through the Building Innovation Capacity (BIC) element of the Partnerships for Innovation program, NSF intends to make up to $10 million in grants to support research partnerships working on projects that operate in the post-fundamental or translational stage of development with a “clear path to commercialization.” For this program, NSF requires letters of intent by December 2. Read the opportunity.. Learn more about effective Collaboration  During SSTI’s 2016 Annual Conference, we will dedicate time to explore interorganizational collaboration and bring practitioners together in a panel to share their experiences and knowledge fostering research collaborations across disciplines and/or organizations. See the full agenda at: http://2016.ssticonference.org/. 

As policymakers and economic developers grow to recognize the need to create broader opportunities for prosperity to sustain future national competitiveness, four facts reveal one of the complex and compounding factors hampering productive participation from a significant segment of our population:   No country incarcerates more of its population than the United States does – despite U.S. crime rates being at historic lows.  source With nearly 2.3 million people incarcerated presently, the United States houses around 22 percent of the world's prisoners, while representing less than 4.5 percent of global population.  source An estimated 60 percent of formerly incarcerated individuals remain unemployed one year after their release, raising the risk of recidivism and resulting in lost lifetime earnings. source Nearly half of U.S. children today now have at least one parent with a criminal record. source What might be the prospects of those children climbing the ladder to become future tech entrepreneurs for your community – or even simply active participants in an innovation-based economy – if so many of the bottom rungs are…