SSTI Digest

The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) and the National Economic Council (NEC) published a call to action concerning the upcoming National Manufacturing Day (October 7, 2016) – an annual celebration of the strength of American manufacturing and an opportunity to educate and motivate the next generation of manufacturers. To celebrate this year’s theme – “the vitality and reality of American manufacturing to youth and workers across the country” – the administration is launching an effort to inspire the next generation of manufacturers and support entrepreneurs manufacturing their first product in the United States. The effort invites U.S. companies, universities, mayors and local communities, foundations, philanthropists, and individual makers and entrepreneurs to submit ideas, make commitments, and/or identify actions items. These action items will: Improve the image of manufacturing by sharing the diverse testimonials from today’s manufacturers or hosting a virtual factory tour so that anyone can experience modern shop floors; Strengthen the STEM education pipeline by adding making and manufacturing…

The European Union (EU) will commit €240 million (approximately 265 million USD) to create a nonprofit Research and Innovation Institute in Greece that will fund research and innovation to support the country’s efforts to pull it out of prolonged recession and create new high-paying jobs, according to the University World News. In addition to broadly supporting research and innovation, the Research and Innovation Institute is intended to spur private sector investment in participating academic institutions, research centers, companies, and scientists by reducing the risk that currently exist due to the Greek debt crisis. Through the European Investment Bank, the EU will make an investment of €180 million (approximately 201.2 million USD) at an interest rate which could be 0.7 percent to 0.8 percent. The Greek government will be responsible for contributing the remaining 25 percent (€60 million, approximately $67.1 million USD). Read the article…

The Department of Defense’s Army Contracting Command released a new federal funding opportunity (FFO) to establish and sustain a Robots in Manufacturing Environments Manufacturing Innovation Institute (RIME-MII) to increase U.S. competitiveness in robotics applied primarily in manufacturing environments. The intent of the new $80 million RIME-MII is to: Enourage the development and scale-up for commercialization of critical enabling technologies such as: human-robot/robot-robot collaboration; perception and sensing; robot control to include adaptation, learning, and repurposing; autonomy and mobility; and dexterous manipulation; Establish common standards and testing protocols allowing the integration of multiple robotics technologies; Create a robotic technology-solution repository (to include modelling tools, databases, catalog of technology demonstrations and concept sharing mechanisms); and, Provide workforce training and education programs to ensure the U.S. workforce can effectively utilize and collaborate with robots in a broad spectrum of manufacturing environments. Lead institutions’ eligibility are restricted to institutions of higher education…

A recently released report finds evidence that Canada’s tech sector – when properly defined – plays an important role in the nation’s economy. In The State of Canada’s Tech Sector, authors Creig Lamb and Matthew Seddon develop a definition of the tech sector based on those industries employing an oversized share of technology occupations. Ultimately, they suggest that the sector is responsible for $117 billion (88.9 billion USD) in economic output, roughly on par with finance and insurance and construction as a percent of total GDP (7.1 percent). In the report, Lamb and Seddon – policy advisors from the Brookfield Institute for Innovation + Entrepreneurship (BII+E), a newly founded, nonpartisan research institute housed within Toronto’s Ryerson University – attempt to more accurately capture the contribution of the tech sector to Canada’s economy by developing ground-up definitions and applying methodologies originally used by the UK’s Nesta, the Brookings Institution and the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics. Although the technology sector is…

Sixty percent of students drop out or transfer from science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields, and more than 50 percent of students pursuing STEM in community colleges never graduate, according to new research from researchers at the University of Missouri (UM) and other partner institutions. The five-year National Science Foundation-backed (NSF) study is collecting data from 12 engineering colleges in the U.S. and recently reached the conclusion of its second year. The researchers report that the preliminary data also indicates that there may be a statistically significant difference in STEM retention at institutions of higher education between male and female students. These new preliminary findings support the findings of similar 2016 studies on gender differences in STEM retention. In Characteristics of US Students That Pursued a STEM Major and Factors That Predicted Their Persistence in Degree Completion, Wichita State researcher Wei-Cheng J. Mau reported results of a five-year study that found significant gender differences in entering, completing, and persistence in the STEM pipeline. The author found that only 16.2 percent of women achieved a STEM…

A new report from the White House Council of Economic Advisers provides a broad overview of student loan-debt in the United States and yields some potentially surprising conclusions: while the $1.3 trillion in total student-loan debt in the U.S. may seem like a staggering amount, the authors of Investing in Higher Education: Benefits, Challenges, and the State of Student Loan Debt contend that this is helping, not hurting the nation’s economy. The authors posit that college is best viewed as an investment that typically yields a high return, even with the high upfront costs. The years of the Obama administration saw a proliferation in student-loan debt, but also a large increase in college enrollment, according to the report. This reflects past experiences of enrollment in college and graduate schools typically rising during periods of high unemployment such as those during the first several years of the Obama presidency, the authors note. Furthermore, during this time the cost of tuition increased at many universities due to a variety of reasons, such as declines in state funding or expensive attempts to improve educational quality. The increased cost of college…

In an effort to advance entrepreneurship among their student bodies and grow their regional entrepreneurship ecosystems, six historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) will receive up to $24,000 in support services as part of a new program from the Delta Regional Authority. Funds from the HBCU Entrepreneurial Ecosystem Initiative will primarily be used for universities to work with partners to identify entrepreneurial resources within the regional system, categorize strengths and weaknesses, and to strategically build around opportunities. Additionally, the selected schools will each host a two-day technical assistance and rapid acceleration workshop that seeks to teach student entrepreneurs about the types of skills and resources needed to launch and scale businesses. Student entrepreneurs will then pitch their ideas for a chance to be selected to present at Founders Weekend, where finalists will receive mentorship with…

When the U.S. government made their R&D tax credit permanent in December 2015, it made a long-term commitment to using incentives to entice private firms to invest in research and development, joining many countries around the world. Although most studies find that R&D tax incentives promote R&D, there is little consensus on the extent of this effect. A recent firm-level analysis from the United Kingdom finds some of the strongest evidence to date on the effectiveness of R&D tax credits in incentivizing innovation. At the same time, however, other studies suggest other elements of a national economy such as education and infrastructure may be more important. In Do Tax Incentives for Research Increase Firm Innovation? An RD Design for R&D, Antoine Dechezleprêtre, Elias Einiö, Ralf Martin, Kieu-Trang Nguyen, and John Van Reenen – four researchers from the London School of Economics – analyze a 2008 policy that changed the threshold for what size businesses counted as a small and medium-enterprise (SME) for the UK R&D Tax Credit system. Although the United Kingdom has had an R&D tax credit in place since the year 2000, firms with…

For the 10th consecutive quarter, the venture capital (VC) industry invested $10 billion in a single quarter after investing $15.3 billion in Q2 2016, according to the MoneyTree™ Report from PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP (PwC) and the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA). Based on data provided by Thomson Reuters, the report highlights that “total venture dollars deployed to startup companies for the quarter increased 20 percent ($15.3 billion invested) and total deal count was down 5 percent (961 deals completed), compared with Q1 of 2016 when $12.7 billion was invested in 1,011 deals.” In comparison to this time last year, Q2 2015, dollars and deals are down 12 and 22 percent, respectively. PwC researchers found that seed stage investments declined by 5 percent during Q2 (totaling $535 million in 45 deals) from Q1 of 2016 and represented only 3 percent of all venture investment dollars for the quarter and 5 percent of all deals. The average seed stage deal in Q2 was $11.9 million – up from $8.4 million in Q1. The report also highlights that early stage investments declined by 14 percent from Q1 of this year in dollars invested ($4 billion)…

Over the last several months, there has been a flurry of activity in government-supported efforts focused on addressing the skills gap faced by manufacturing firms and other key S&T industries. The intent of these programs is to develop industry-led partnership that align workforce development efforts with the needs of specific local industries to unlock a region’s economic prosperity.  In July, two new initiatives were announced that may help provide a data-driven guide for these efforts in the future. By mapping job skills around the nexus of manufacturing and design, the Chicago-based Digital Manufacturing and Design Innovation Institute (DMDII) hopes to better develop a workforce for the 21st century manufacturing workplace. At the Center for Data Science and Public Policy (DSaPP) at the University of Chicago, a team of researchers hopes to develop a public database that will contain the “DNA” of every job in America that is akin to the output of the Human Genome Project. In Partnership with ManpowerGroup, DMDII announced a new public-partnership to “define and map the roles and skills required by…

Two recently released indices assess countries and cities on the characteristics that enable female entrepreneurship. The 2015 Female Entrepreneurship Index finds the U.S., Australia, the U.K., Denmark and the Netherlands offer the world’s most attractive environments for high-potential female entrepreneurship. Meanwhile, the Dell Women Entrepreneur Cities Index ranks New York City, California’s Bay Area, London, Stockholm and Singapore as the top cities for female entrepreneurship. These indices may be useful to policymakers who are limited in their knowledge of the conditions that enable entrepreneurship, especially among females and other underrepresented communities. New research from Siri Terjesen of American University seeks to synthesize the growing body of research on female entrepreneurship to build an index that allows for an increased understanding of the individual and institutional factors that influence high-potential female entrepreneurship. The goal of this tool, according to Terjesen, is to help policymakers assess the strengths and weaknesses of their entrepreneurial environment as it pertains to gender. The 2015 Female…

A recently released analysis of mayoral State of the City addresses finds that economic development was the most frequently mentioned topic in such speeches for the third straight year. The National League of Cities’ (NLC) State of the Cities 2016 report reviews speeches from 100 mayors across the United States and in cities with populations ranging from 50,000 to more than 300,000. Economic development was mentioned in 75 percent of mayoral speeches, making it the biggest issue on mayors’ agenda – ahead of public safety (70 percent) and city budgeting (52 percent) – according to a NLC press release. Regionally, economic development ranked as the most mentioned topic in the West and South, while finishing second in the Northeast, and third in the Midwest. Economic development also ranked as the most important topic for mayors in cities with populations less than 50,000 and more than 100,000, but third in mid-sized cities with a population between 50,000 and 99,000 people. Broadly, the most commonly mentioned economic development subtopics were jobs (mentioned in 55 percent of State of the City speeches), arts and culture (35 percent), and…