SSTI Digest

Vice President Joe Biden announced a $100 million competition to expand tuition-free community college programs that connect young Americans to in-demand jobs. To support a growing trend of free community college programs, America’s Promise Job-Driven Training grants (America’s Promise Grants) will provide federal funding for the creation and expansion of regional and sector partnerships between community colleges, local industries, other training providers, employers, and, the public workforce system targeted at in-demand middle and high-skilled jobs across the country. The program will be launched in early summer by the Department of Labor and will be supported by funds from H-1B visas. In the last year, nearly 30 new free college programs have been launched including statewide programs in Oregon, Minnesota, and Rhode Island, according to the press release. The intent of the program is to prepare individuals for well-paying jobs in key regional industries such as manufacturing, IT, health care, cybersecurity and energy.

The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced last month the availability of more than $11 million in grants to support rural broadband through its Community Connect grant program, which seeks to help fund broadband deployment into rural communities where it is not yet economically viable for private sector providers to deliver service. For FY 2016, the minimum grant amount is $100,000, while the maximum award is $3 million. Additional information can be found here. Meanwhile, the Department of Commerce’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) has released new materials to help communities realize the importance of broadband and develop roadmaps for its broader implementation.

A new report from the Lumina Foundation finds the U.S. is making progress in the number of Americans holding high-quality credentials beyond high school diplomas. For the seventh straight year, the percentage of the country’s working age population (age 25-64 years) with a quality post-secondary credential increased, reaching 45.3 percent in 2014. Even with the progress that has been made, however, the U.S. still has a long way to go to meet the foundation’s goal that, by 2025, more than 60 percent of Americans will hold high-quality post-secondary degrees or certificates, according to the report. The full report also includes individual policy briefs for each state, highlighting discrepancies between credential, population group, county, and age.

The Department of Energy (DOE) announced today that they are seeking proposals for a new Clean Energy Manufacturing Institute, a part of the National Network for Manufacturing Innovation (NNMI). The $70 million Modular Chemical Process Intensification Institute will focus on developing breakthrough technologies that increase the energy efficiency of manufacturing processes used across an array of U.S. industries. Examples could include ethylene for plastics and biofuels used in sustainable transportation, among others. Proposals for this institute, which will be the fourth within the NNMI led by the DOE, are due June 15.

Wells Fargo & Company released a five-year, company-wide corporate social responsibility (CSR) strategy that includes significant commitments to inclusion, innovation, small business lending, and community investment. Its 2020 social commitment will target three commitment areas – diversity and social inclusion; economic empowerment; and, economic sustainability. Proposed funding includes:

The Small Business Administration (SBA) announced the 2016 Growth Accelerator Fund competition. In its third year, the SBA will commit up to $3.95 million for accelerators and other entrepreneurial ecosystem models to compete for monetary prizes of $50,000 each. This year, the SBA will partner with several other federal agencies – NIH, NSF, Department of Education, and USDA – to provide additional prizes to accelerators that assist entrepreneurs with submitting proposals for the Small Business Innovation (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) programs. Applications must be submitted by June 3.

As the 2015-2016 academic year comes to a close, universities and their industry partners have announced several new university-industry partnerships to leverage university research capabilities to address industry needs. Fortune 500 companies including IBM, Rolls-Royce, and several pharma companies have agreed to commit millions of dollars to support these partnerships targeted at increasing the pace of scientific discovery as well as training the next generation of STEM professionals. Partnerships have been announced in Illinois, Indiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and internationally in Canada and Switzerland.

Coming off a record setting year, industry analysts contended that there would be a more cautious U.S. venture capital industry (VC) in 2016 with discussion of a VC bubble. However, in Q1 of 2016, venture capitalists invested more than $10 billion for the ninth consecutive quarter with little concern over a bubble. In total, VCs invested $12.1 billion in 969 deals in the Q1 of 2016, according to the MoneyTree Report from PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP (PwC) and the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA). At the same time, U.S. venture capital firms raised $12.0 billion for 57 funds during Q1 of 2016, making it the strongest quarter for funds raised since Q2 of 2006, according to the Fundraising Report by Thomson Reuters and NVCA. A review of the data indicates continuation of trends in where venture capital is being invested, the decline of investment in seed stage companies, and increasing corporate venture capital activity with 20.6 percent of funds invested in Q1 of 2016 coming from corporate venture capital.

On April 20, the Virginia General Assembly sent three economic development-focused bills (HB 1343, HB 846, and HB 834) to Gov. Terry McAuliffe. The bills include the creation of a new research fund and the creation of a network of regional economic development councils. Although the bills have yet to be signed, Gov. McAuliffe has publicly supported each of them. This package of economic development initiatives was originally proposed in the governor’s economic development strategy as well as his recent budget proposal. However, it took some compromise between the governor’s original proposals and the General Assembly to reach a final package.

In its first passage of a broad energy bill since the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007, the U.S. Senate included provisions in the Energy Policy Modernization Act of 2016 (S.2012) that would: increase the authorization level for the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Science by 5 percent per year to $7.1 billion; increase the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) program’s authorization level to $375 million in 2020, up from $291 million this year; help remove barriers for technology transfer at the federal laboratories; and, authorize the DOE to establish “microlabs” in close proximity to federal labs in support of regional innovation. The bipartisan legislation was approved by a vote of 85 to 12.

Last month, the Department of Energy (DOE) released its first United States Energy and Employment Report (USEER) in an effort to articulate in clearer terms the sector’s wide-ranging impact on the national economy. While this report covers the entirety of the energy spectrum, a related report released just weeks after, Clean Jobs America: A Comprehensive Analysis of Clean Jobs in America, looks only at those jobs related to the clean energy economy. Based on SSTI’s analysis, Clean Jobs America suggests that there are more than 2.5 million clean energy jobs in the United States, or 44 percent of the 5,729,882 energy jobs highlighted in the DOE report.

Only 8 percent of partners with the authority to invest at 2,300 micro- and venture capital (VC) firms are women (and only 7 percent of the top 100 firms), according to CrunchBase Women in Venture, a new report providing a detailed snapshot of the state of female investors and founders. The report finds of 54 corporate VC divisions and 101 accelerators, 12 percent of partners were female. The report did find some possible signs of improvement; among 826 VC firms with “deep teams,” 22 percent of lower-titled employees are women, suggesting that opportunities for promotion to partner may yield better balance, and among new micro- and VC firms in the last three years, 16 percent, or 20 of 125, had at least one female partner—double the rate among existing firms.