SSTI Digest

Over the past few weeks, the State of Oregon has announced a number of new capital opportunities for small businesses. Business Oregon, the state’s economic development agency, will invest $250,000 to support a new Inclusive Startup Fund that will invest in Portland-area startups founded by women and people of color. Fund leaders hope to raise a total of $3 million and match portfolio businesses with mentoring and business advising services. The agency also announced a new $250,000 loan program to help small manufacturers expand. The Oregon Growth Board announced its own $250,000 investment in an angel fund launched by TiE Oregon. The TAP Fund will co-invest with TiE Angels Oregon to support early-stage startups.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology's (NIST) Hollings Manufacturing Extension Partnership (MEP) is conducting three regional forums on the proposed recompetition of MEP Centers in 11 states and Puerto Rico. The regional forums are intended to provide interested entities more information about the MEP program, the federal funding opportunity and answers to any questions regarding the funding announcement prior to its targeted release of January 2016. MEP centers up for recompetition under the 2016 announcement include Alabama, Arkansas, California, Georgia, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Missouri, Montana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Puerto Rico and Vermont.

Dates and locations of upcoming forums include:

Despite media reports that the most recent economic recovery has been largely driven by job growth in low-paying positions, a new report from the Georgetown Center for Workforce and Education finds that it is actually high-paying jobs that are leading this growth, and nearly all of them are going to individuals with at least a college degree. According to Good Jobs Are Back: College Graduates Are First in Line, during the economic recovery from 2010 to 2014, good jobs – those that pay more than $53,000 annually and are more likely to be full-time and offer benefits – represented 44 percent of all job gains, or 2.9 million jobs. Low-wage jobs paying $32,000 or less accounted for just 27 percent (1.8 million) of the jobs added in the recovery, while middle-wage jobs represented 29 percent (1.9 million jobs). Using a methodology that segments populations of workers by occupations rather than industries, the authors are able to compare individuals with similar sets of skills and who earn similar wages against each other, providing a more accurate picture of the economic recovery.

Finding private-sector champions, building strong mentor networks, and creating organizational flexibility rank among the most critical elements of success, according to leaders of the 2014 Excellence in TBED award recipients. Expert insights on how these and other issues can be addressed are found in the latest SSTI Awards podcast series. The awards program and podcasts reveal best practices in supporting university startups, building meaningful relationships between leaders of industry and local startups, investing in early stage companies, launching an accelerator program that creates successful graduates, and bringing together regional assets to support the growth of an industry cluster. Each of these conversations with award-winning programs provides listeners with practical and proven strategies to improve their own organization's performance and regional impact.

The current podcast series includes:

Due to a lack of activity by the state’s three privately-run regional EB-5 centers that serve the state of Maine, the Maine Department of Economic and Community Development (MECD) is considering launching its own EB-5 visa program to attract more direct foreign investment to the state, according to the Bangor Daily News. Under the proposed state-run EB-5 program, the state hopes to create economic prosperity and job creation by stimulating foreign direct investment into economic development projects across the state – in return the foreign investors gain a fast-track path to citizenship. To be eligible for the EB-5 program, foreign investors must invest $500,000 to $1 million in a project that helps create or retain at least 10 jobs in the United States. The recent announcement comes almost four years after the state legislature directed MECD to set up a state-run regional center.

This week, President Obama issued an executive order in an attempt to make the Presidential Innovation Fellows program a permanent part of the federal government. Administered as a partnership between the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, the White House Office of Management and Budget, and the General Services Administration, the Presidential Innovation Fellows program is a 12-month, competitive initiative that pairs technologists and entrepreneurs with government agencies to collaborate on difficult problems and build a culture of innovation within the government. Since launching in 2012, nearly 100 innovators have been recruited into the program, working in projects around areas such as government IT, renewable energy affordability and veteran employment.

Between 2007 and 2012, the number of women-owned businesses in the U.S. grew by more than 27 percent, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s Survey of Business Owners. The agency reports that women owned about 9.9 million businesses in 2012, about 36 percent of all firms. In 2007, only 29 percent of businesses were owned by women.  Business ownership also appears to have become a bit more racially diverse during those years, with the share of minority business-owners growing from 21 percent to 29 percent. Much of the surge among women business owners appears to have come from women of color.

The report includes data on business ownership by gender, ethnicity and veteran status both by state and for the nation as a whole. A more complete version, with additional data on industry, firm receipts and employment, will be released in December.

Update: You can view the full webinar and download the slide presentation at: http://ssti.org/regional-innovation-strategies-program-informational-webinar

Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker announced the launch of the Economic Development Administration's (EDA) 2015 Regional Innovation Strategies (RIS) Program competition to spur innovation capacity-building activities in regions across the nation. Under the 2015 announcement, SBA will commit $10 million for two funding opportunities:

This week marked the launch of New York Ventures, an Empire State Development program dedicated to encouraging innovation and fueling economic growth in communities across New York. The program is derived of three separate funds: the $100 million New York State Innovation Venture Capital Fund; the $45 million Innovative NY Fund; and, the $2 million Minority- and Women-Owned Business Investment Fund. As part of the New York Ventures launch, Empire State Development also announced the NYS Innovation Venture Capital Fund’s close on financing for two New York-based tech companies.

At a White House event, the Small Business Administration (SBA) announced approximately $4 million to prizes to 80 growth accelerators in 43 states the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico through the second round of its Growth Accelerator Fund Competition. Launched in 2014, the competition makes awards of $50,000 each to help fund operating budgets for accelerators and other entrepreneurial ecosystem models in parts of the country where there are fewer conventional sources of access to capital (e.g., venture capital and angel capital investors). The SBA Office of Native American Affairs also used the competition to award an additional $400,000 to ecosystems primarily dedicated to Native American entrepreneurs and small businesses. Read the press release…

Last week, the Department of Agriculture (USDA) held a special meeting that include approximately 100 investors and venture capitalists to help stimulate private sector investments in rural infrastructure projects with the potential to spur economic development in small towns and rural communities across the country. Through its U.S. Rural Infrastructure Opportunity Fund, the USDA has helped to facilitate the investment of nearly $161 million in private capital toward 22 critical water and community facilities projects in 14 states.

Conducted by the National League of Cities (NLC), the Local Economic Conditions Survey 2015 asks government officials in more than 250 cities across the nation to assess their local economic conditions. Painting a broad picture of the economic health of cities, Cities and Unequal Recovery highlights key points from the most recent survey. The report finds that economic conditions over the past year have improved in nearly all cities, with 28 percent of city leaders indicating that conditions have improved greatly and 64 percent reporting slight improvements. In the 2013 Local Economic Conditions Survey, just 8 percent of cities reported greatly improved local economic conditions from the year before.