SSTI Digest

July 293:00 p.m. EDTFree Please join us for the Innovation Finance subcommunity meeting where we will discuss Innovation Finance 101. This meeting is intended to be the first in a series of foundational conversations on innovation finance and will focus on the terminology, process, and structure of venture capital investment. Register here.    August 122:00 p.m. EDTFree The Lab-to-Market subcommunity meeting occurs every 2nd Tuesday at 2:00 p.m. Eastern time) The August discussion will focus on the national and regional ecosystems for moving technologies out of the laboratory to create new products, companies, and jobs. Come prepared to share about initiatives in your region: What’s working and what’s not? How have you worked around bottlenecks in the process? Register here.   August 132:00 p.m. EDTFree The Innovation Finance subcommunity is hosting a conversation with SBA staff on the updated SBIC Accrual model that can serve to expand venture capital funding. Attendees will hear from program staff about the details of this program, which allows fund managers to access up to 1.25…

The New York City Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC) recently announced that it is awarding Fordham University $3 million from its Greenlight Innovation Fund. The university will also receive additional funds, including a $1.1 million grant from Councilman Oswald Feliz, to create the Bronx Green Job Center (BGJC), a workforce development and entrepreneurship hub that aims to create an equitable green-job pipeline in the Bronx. BGJC’s programs and services are expected to support workforce development initiatives in the green economy. Its workforce development programs are set to launch in the Fall of 2026. The Greenlight Innovation Fund grants money to programs for the development of facilities in New York City that support the green economy, life sciences, and advanced technology (collectively, the “Innovation Industries”). According to the announcement, the Greenlight Innovation Fund “supports projects which generate good-paying jobs, support commercialization of technologies in future-focused sectors, and catalyze an ecosystem of entrepreneurs with a focus on equity.” NYCEDC has an initial allocation of up to $50 million of City Capital dollars for the…

The overlap between applicants and recipients of the three large regional innovation approaches attempted by the federal government so far continues with the July 9, 2025, NSF narrowing of the field for the second NSF Regional Innovation Engines competition to 29 semifinalists across the country. Predominantly with teams led by universities and university affiliates (25 of the 29 selections), the contenders include 17 NSF Engines Development Awards teams who received two-year planning grants in 2023 and early 2024 that they leveraged to help build coalitions and refine visions for dynamic innovation ecosystems within their regions. It also includes regions that have served as EDA Tech Hubs designees, Tech Hub winners, and recipients of Building Better Regions Phase I and/or Phase II awards. Seventy-one teams engaged in this round of the competition. One may view a map of the 29 new NSF Engines semifinalists here. During the next stage of the competition, NSF will conduct virtual interviews and assessments of the semifinalist teams to gain further understanding of their regional coalitions, the alignment of their proposed leadership teams and core partners, and…

Please note: this article is not intended as a comprehensive review of Public Law No. 119-21, nor should our reading of the law be treated as tax or legal advice. Now that the dust has settled on the federal budget reconciliation package, Public Law No: 119-21, SSTI presents to its Digest readership our look at the legislation from a technology-based economic development (TBED) perspective. The process nuances, potential fiscal impacts, and broad policy changes of the 870-page act have been extensively covered elsewhere, so we won’t rehash those here. Instead, we will focus on a few key highlights of changes to the tax code and what those could mean for TBED activities. The majority of the new law is focused on federal revenues through tax changes, there are new spending items of note for the TBED community. There is a new provision that funds an artificial intelligence-driven research initiative at federal labs. The law establishes the American Science Cloud and appropriates $150 million to the Department of Energy to use AI to support the development of novel microelectronics and energy technologies from Department of Energy and National Labs data. Only…

Over the past 40 years, many people involved in SBIR and empirical analysts in the research, finance, and technology sectors have said SBIR awardees, as a group, are uniquely important for America’s innovation goals. Research presented in a recent NBER working paper provides further evidence backing up those claims and reveals SBIR companies may be preferable for innovation productivity and efficiency—particularly for advancing strategic national, social and environmental goals—to innovation-oriented companies simply backed by venture capital, the finance instrument most often tracked for evidence of innovation success or progress. Researchers Kyle R. Myers, Lauren Lanahan, and Evan Johnson write in “Small Business Innovation Applied to National Needs” that SBIR-backed businesses produce three times more patents per firm and nearly eight times the federal contract engagement than their VC-based counterparts, yet SBIR firms have 15% lower employment figures.  SBIR winners also were found to have less revenue than VC-backed…

SSTI has updated its Key Technology Area Investment Data Tool with new and refreshed data spanning January 1, 2013, through June 30, 2025. The tool comprises two interactive visuals and uses Pitchbook technology verticals selected to align with many of the key technology focus areas (KTFAs) defined in the CHIPS and Science Act of 2022 (CHIPS). The tool breaks down the number of investment-backed companies, investment deals, and amount of capital invested by each state, year (2013-2025H1), and investment stage (e.g., seed, angel, venture). For this update, data through June 30, 2025, were downloaded on July 1, 2025, and built into the provided visualizations on the data tool webpage. Note that because many investment deals are not subject to disclosure, it is difficult to immediately identify investment activity, often leading to data for more recent years being less complete. This potential for incomplete data is a critical issue to consider when exploring data from the first half of 2025 and other recent periods. SSTI analyzed Pitchbook’s 59 industry verticals for which they collect investment data, compared them to the 10 CHIPS-defined KTFAs, and…

The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) is requesting information from the public to help shape potential future updates to its Key Technology Focus Areas (KTFAs). NSF’s KTFAs directly influence and shape innovation- and economic development-related programs. For example, KTFAs have been important factors in the Economic Development Administration’s (EDA) Regional Technology and Innovation Hubs (Tech Hubs) and NSF’s Regional Innovation Engines (Engines) programs which require regions to advance a critical technology area that already has traction in their region. Comments are due on or before 11:59 p.m. EST on July 21, 2025. For information on how and where to submit comments, refer to the official request for information here. While the above programs support regions advancing a critical technology area already present in their region, identifying such areas is often challenging for proposers to programs like these. Recognizing this, SSTI has recently updated a data tool with data through the first half of 2025, which includes two interactive visuals that can aid in identifying the critical technologies in potential applicants’ geographic locations. …

In 2024, nearly 628,000 job postings demanded at least one AI skill, according to research from the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta’s Center for Workforce and Economic Opportunity. The research also revealed that the percentage of all job postings requiring at least one AI skill increased from approximately 0.5% in 2010 to 1.7% in 2024. These numbers, however, do not inform workforce development practitioners or workers selecting training programs about which levels of education produce the most in-demand workers entering the AI-dominated workforce, nor do they indicate which occupations at what level of educational attainment have increasing demand for these skills. To provide these insights, the Fed researchers conducted an examination of the growth in employer demand for AI skills, analyzing online job posting data from 2010 to 2024.  The researchers conclude that the highest demand for AI skills within major occupational groups in the Standard Occupational Classification (SOC) system—regardless of educational level—was, logically, in computer and mathematical occupations; in 2023, 12.3% of all job postings in that area asked for AI skills, an increase from 1.6%…

Patents serve as a powerful tool that promotes the disclosure and diffusion of new innovations while allowing inventors an exclusive period to commercialize and profit from the technology. The U.S., while a hub for innovation and a leader in patents, has experienced stagnation in the growth of Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) applications and USPTO-granted utility patents in recent years. Ever since 2021, China has surpassed the U.S. in PCT applications, and more than half of all USPTO utility patents are owned by foreign entities, including Japan and the European Union.  This edition of Useful Stats explores U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) and PCT patent data compiled from the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics and data from the Business Enterprise R&D (BERD) survey. These data provide a background for how the patent landscape across the U.S. has changed over the past few decades. USPTO is the federal agency responsible for granting U.S. patents and registering trademarks. Patents issued by USPTO are valid only within the U.S. and its territories and do not provide any legal protection abroad. USPTO issues three main types of…

If you are an entrepreneurship service organization (ESO), you likely are seeing more companies within your scope adopting artificial intelligence (AI). But how well do you understand their needs for further assistance with the transformative platform technology? A recent report from the Initiative for a Competitive Inner City (ICIC), “How small business owners are learning, using, and navigating challenges with AI tools,” sheds light on what your companies may be experiencing and offers some recommendations. The findings are based on 3,752 business owners nationwide who responded to an ICIC survey, as well as five focus groups. Eighty-nine percent of business owners who responded to the survey reported that someone in their organization currently utilizes AI. However, who, exactly, is using AI within a company at a specific organizational level varies from industry to industry. The industry where most business owners reported using AI themselves was real estate and rental and leasing, at 63.7%. These same owners in the industry reported that mid- and lower-level management in their companies were using AI at 37.3%, a significantly lower percentage than owners’ usage. In…

Two recent research reports, one from Georgetown University's Center on Education and the Workforce (CEW) and another from Ivy Tech Community College, in collaboration with TEConomy Partners, LLC, focus on credential shortages that are keeping many jobs that don't require a bachelor's degree unfilled. The CEW study examines high-paying middle-skills career worker shortages nationwide, a category that encompasses jobs requiring an associate's degree or certificate and paying more than $55,000 per year. Researchers concluded that the U.S. must produce 712,000 additional certificates and associate's degrees to prepare the workforce for these opportunities. They emphasized that filling these shortages could present significant opportunities for men and women of all races and ethnicities to gain high-paying middle-skills occupations. Shortages are expected to persist through 2032. The Ivy Tech-TEConomy report also reports on the need for non-bachelor's education to prepare the…

The Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s (ASPI) report, ASPI’s two-decade CriticalTechnology Tracker: The rewards of long-term research investment, aims to identifywhich countries and institutions are leading in high-impact research across 64 criticaltechnological domains, including defense, space, energy, environment, artificialintelligence, biotechnology, robotics, cyber, computing, advanced materials, andquantum technologies. The tracker's methodology involves analyzing the top 10% ofhighly cited research publications in each critical technology. According to ASPI, thisapproach emphasizes research that significantly influences the technological lifecycleand is likely to lead to patents and breakthroughs. The dataset spans from 2003 to2023, allowing for both short-term (five-year) and long-term (21-year) trend analyses. The report’s key finding is a change in global leadership. Data from the first five yearscovered in the report (2003-2007) shows the U.S. led in 60 of the 64 technologies backthen. However, data from the last five years (2019-2023), shows China emerged as theleader in 57 of these technologies,…