SSTI Digest

The U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) announced today the addition of three more cluster organizations to the portfolio of communities supported through the SBA Regional Innovation Clusters initiative, raising the total number of awardees in the program to 14.

The three new Regional Innovation Clusters—each receiving $500,000 for the base year of the contract, with four option years to be exercised at the SBA’s discretion, for up to a total of $2.5 million per cluster initiative—are:

BioSTL Bioscience Cluster, St. Louis, Missouri. Contractor: BioSTL Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) Cluster, South Kansas and Oklahoma. Contractor: Development Capital Networks Wood Products Cluster, Appalachian Ohio Region. Contractor: Appalachian Partnership, Inc.

The three new awardees competed with more than 40 other applicant cluster organizations.  

At more than $456 billion, the value of research and development performed in the United States grew 4.8 percent from 2012 to 2013 according to new data from the National Science Foundation’s National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics (NCSES). Over that same one-year period, U.S. gross domestic product grew at just 3.7 percent.

Over the five-year period from 2008-2013, R&D increased at a rate of 2.3 percent annually, while gross domestic product increased at a rate of 2.6 percent annually. Over the previous five-year period from 2003-2008, R&D outpaced GDP growth, increasing at a rate of 6.8 percent annually compared to 5.0 percent annually.  According to NCSES, although in recent years data indicate that total R&D is growing faster than GDP, the longstanding trend of this type of growth has yet to return. 

The last decade has seen a rapid expansion and deepening of the types of vehicles that fund startup firms in the U.S. and worldwide, according to The Globalisation of Angel Investments – a new study from Josh Lerner, Antoinette Schoar, Stanislav Sokolinksy, and Karen Wilson. In particular, the authors have seen a growing role for angel groups and other more “individualistic” funding options, such as super angels or crowd sourcing platforms. To support their claim, the authors examine the records of 13 angel investment groups based in 12 countries, with applicants from 21 nations.

In addition to their findings about the globalization of angel investments, Lerner and his colleagues also found that angel investors have positive impact on the growth, performance and survival of the firms they fund. The positive impact of angel financing remains consistent, regardless of the country’s level of venture activity and its entrepreneur friendliness. They also found that angel investors enhance the ability of the funded firms to obtain follow-on financing.

On National Manufacturing Day, the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the U.S. Commerce Department's National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) announced they will commit $5.8 million over the next three years to establish and sustain a consortium focused on the identification of new, emerging areas of advanced manufacturing. Led by the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, the Alliance for Manufacturing Foresight (MForesight) will provide a channel for rapid input from industrial, academic and other private sectors on future manufacturing technologies. It also will work to help align advanced manufacturing research with national priorities and challenges to ensure efficient use of federal and private funding and increased returns on investments for both parties. MForesight already has established partnerships with more than 30 thought leader/organizations from industry, professional associations and academia to help build an inclusive community focused on advanced manufacturing research and development, education, and training.

At more than 54 million, freelancers now make up more than one-third of the U.S. workforce, according to Freelancing in America 2015, an annual report commissioned by The Freelancers Union and Upwork. Half of all freelancers surveyed for the report said that, regardless of pay, they would not take a traditional job. Furthermore, 60 percent of respondents said that they were freelancing more by choice than by necessity, compared to 53 percent the previous year. Ultimately, these changes in the composition of the U.S. workforce prompt consideration over whether current policies are able to appropriately regulate contingent workers. 

North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory recently signed an economic development bill (HB 117) that would expand the operations of the state’s Job Development Investment Grant (JDIG) fund. The fund, which offers grants to companies for job creation and expansion, will have a higher annual cap, and a contingency to offer even more funds in years in which a “high-yield project” is supported. The North Carolina Competes Act also offers targeted support for a particular type of job creator: data centers. Data centers that invest $75 million or more are now eligible for significant tax incentives. North Carolina’s incentives are intended to help the state compete with a number of other states that have targeted this industry.

Venture investors around the world have more confidence in the U.S. market than any other in the world, according to the 2015 Global Venture Capital Confidence Survey from Deloitte and the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA). Israel, Canada, China and the UK also ranked among the top five. The U.S. policy environment, however, received lower reviews. U.S.-based investors have very low confidence in the government’s ability to enact policies that support domestic investment. The U.S. ranked toward the bottom among participating nations, near Brazil and Sweden. Immigration reform was cited as the top policy concern. Venture fundraising also began to cool in the third quarter of 2015, after peaking in the previous quarter. Fundraising was down 59 percent by dollar commitments, the lowest since 2013. Read the NVCA analysis…

Earlier this week during a keynote address at the United Nations, a U.S. Department of State official unveiled an initiative to bring 1.5 billion people around the world online by 2020. Global Connect, the new initiative, will be a cross-agency effort to make Internet access a top priority in foreign policy. The State Department announcement explicitly states that Internet access is being made a priority because of its role in entrepreneurship, innovation, knowledge flows and market creation. On the domestic front, the White House recently packaged a number of new and existing investments as part of the Smart Cities initiative to build on the country’s broadband infrastructure to leverage the power of big data and become a leader in the emerging “Internet of Things” market.

As a reminder, the closing date for applications to the Regional Innovation Strategies (RIS) program is Monday, October 5. A program of the EDA’s Office of Innovation and Entrepreneurship, the 2015 RIS Program Competition includes $10 million to support two unique grant opportunities:

As the Federal Aviation Administration continues to propose regulations around the fledging unmanned aircraft system (UAS) industry in order to ensure that it integrates into the current system as well as possible, states are beginning to act in order to improve their own competitiveness. The FAA Modernization and Reform Act of 2012 directed the FAA to establish a test sites program for the UAS, taking into account geographic and climatic diversity, location of ground infrastructure, and research needs in choosing the sites.

The Department of Energy (DOE) released the 2015 Quadrennial Technology Review (QTR), a more than 500-page report examining the status of foundational energy science and technology (S&T). The QTR also highlights the research, development, demonstration, and deployment (RDD&D) opportunities with a focus on technologies with commercialization potential in the mid-term and beyond. DOE intends to use the QTR in assisting decision makers as they set priorities, within budget constraints, to fund RDD&D and commercialization efforts that will develop more secure, affordable, and sustainable energy services.

In the QTR, DOE outlines three enduring strategic objectives of the agency’s efforts related to creating a national energy system:

Researchers from the Federal Reserve Banks of Kansas City and Atlanta, along with the John J Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University, recently published a comprehensive examination of the state of contemporary workforce initiatives. Editors Carl Van Horn, Tammy Edwards and Todd Green have assembled chapters and case studies from more than 70 authors that depict challenges, long-term structural changes and policy opportunities in national, state and local workforce efforts in the current economy. Of particular interest to the TBED community are King and Prince’s article on scaling sectoral and career pathway programs, an examination of the success of the Wired65 initiative in Kentucky and Indiana, and several articles on building data-driven intelligent workforce systems.