SSTI Digest

Investments and policy to support innovation-focused agendas have flourished with the close of the 2014 legislative sessions in several states. Crowdfunding legislation, incentives for attracting talent, higher education affordability, punishing patent trolls, and encouraging greater accountability are some of the areas where lawmakers focused their efforts.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) announced a new round of funding for the Innovation Corps Sites (I-Corps Sites) Program.  Housed at institutions of higher education, I-Corps Sites are intended to:

Just three years ago, lawmakers in Washington put into place a research and commercialization initiative designed as a public-private model to build on the work of two longstanding agencies and better serve the state’s innovation community. The program, Innovate Washington, was eliminated in the legislature during the 2014 session with the passage of HB 2029 and its responsibilities transferred to the state’s Department of Commerce. Funding to support research grants under the Life Sciences Discovery Fund is reduced in the supplemental budget agreement passed by lawmakers.

Under HB 2029, the Innovate Washington Agency responsibilities are transferred to the Department of Commerce no later than June 30. While no new funding was appropriated to the agency last year, Innovate Washington had $2.6 million left in reserves. With enactment of the bill, any remaining balance is transferred to Commerce. The bill also stipulates that the agency’s two facilities be transferred to Washington State University.

Florida Gov. Rick Scott recently provided details on his $80 million plan to bolster cancer research and treatment in the state. Of that amount, $60 million would be aimed at building a statewide network of federally designated National Cancer Institute centers, while the remaining $20 million would support peer-reviewed research grants. Currently, Florida only has one National Cancer Institute center, the Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa. Gov. Scott’s effort would help centers in Orlando, Miami and possibly other parts of the state, upgrade their programs to pursue the designation.  Read the announcement…

North Carolina universities receive a larger share of research dollars from businesses than higher education institutions in any other state, according to the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Higher Education Research and Development (HERD) survey. The most recent survey provides data on research expenditures by source for each state and territory for FY12. Wisconsin and the District of Columbia received the greatest share of R&D funding from nonprofits, while Wyoming, Maryland Guam and the Virgin Island receive the largest share of funding from the federal government.

North Carolina’s advantage in corporate funding stems from the large amount of private dollars received by Duke University. In FY12, Duke received $226.2 million from private sources, about triple the amount received by any other institution in the state and more than any other university in the country. Businesses funded about $316.8 million in North Carolina academic R&D in FY12, about 11.8 percent of the state total.

Corporate-sponsored research resulted in licenses and patents much more frequently than federally sponsored projects at the campuses of the University of California system between 1990 and 2010, according to findings published in Nature. While federally funded research produced licenses in 22 percent of cases, 29 percent of industry-supported projects led to licenses. Federally supported projects led to licenses 26 percent of the time, while corporate research did so in 29 percent of cases.  Corporate sponsorship also led to more citations in future patents. This was true across technology fields.

Authors Brian D. Wright, Kyriakos Drivas, Zhen Lei and Stephen A. Merrill found that inventions with both types of support were even more likely to commercialize technologies. While the authors anticipated that corporations were more likely to fund applied research that could be quickly brought to market, they also hypothesized that industry research would more often lead to discoveries that were locked down with exclusive licenses or be so narrow as to limit their number of future citations. The latter two predictions turned out to be false.

Increased scrutiny for public investments has grown in recent years amid tight budget conditions. Returns on innovation-focused efforts often take time, and as a result TBED groups are always looking to improve metrics and reporting to meet greater demand for transparency. In Utah, lawmakers recently passed a bill providing more oversight for the state’s signature innovation-capacity building program following a critical audit last year. At the same time, lawmakers continued to embrace the concept of the agency they established eight years prior, and appropriated level funds to continue USTAR’s efforts in research and commercialization. The legislature also passed a bill dedicating $20 million to the STEM Action Center created last session.  

USTAR is slated to receive $22 million in FY15 funding, the same as last year. USTAR accomplishes its economic objective to increase innovation, entrepreneurship and investment through three components. This includes star faculty recruitment, building world-class research facilities, and the business development technology outreach teams that specialize in commercialization.

A bill providing $35.4 million in workforce training grants to expand Wisconsin’s Fast Forward program was signed into law on Monday by Gov. Scott Walker. Funding will be available in the form of grants to technical colleges to reduce waiting lists for enrollment and for programs and courses that train students in high-demand fields. The funds also will support collaborative projects among school districts, technical colleges and businesses and for employment opportunities for people with disabilities. The measure, Act 139, was approved during a special session, which convened in January.    

In an effort to help spur economic prosperity, several universities have unveiled new initiatives to connect potential entrepreneurs with university resources and help integrate the entrepreneurs into their region’s innovation ecosystem. In partnership with other organizations, these programs are intended to position each respective university as a driver of regional economic development through the provision of education, training initiatives and other support services. The initiatives include new programs at Clarion University in Pennsylvania, Carroll University in Wisconsin and New York University (NYU).  The Blackstone Charitable Foundation also announced it will expand LaunchPad, a university-led entrepreneurship program, to a partnership that includes three universities in Southern California.

Between FY2007-12, research and development (R&D) spending at U.S. universities grew 27.5 percent, from about $51.6 billion to $65.8 billion, according to the latest edition of the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Higher Education Research and Development (HERD) survey. The survey provides a look at R&D spending at U.S. universities, with data broken down by state, institution, research area and funding sources. California remained the leader in university R&D spending, but spending in the state grew at a slightly lower rate than the national average. Most of the other top 20 states experienced gains that exceeded the national average.

The National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) Manufacturing Extension Partnership (MEP) program recently awarded $2.5 million for five pilot projects to improve small U.S. manufacturers' supply chain competitiveness and foster their readiness to adopt advanced technologies. The projects will be led by MEP centers and bring together teams of experts in specific technology areas. MEP centers in California, Georgia, Oregon, Texas and Wisconsin each will receive approximately $500,000 for the pilot efforts, which, in most cases, involve partners in other states. Read the announcement…

Maine businesses may now raise up to $1 million in capital by selling small amounts of equity to individual investors as a result of legislation that recently became law without the signature of Gov. Paul LePage. Using a model similar to crowdfunding websites such as Kickstarter, participating businesses will be able to register with the Maine Office of Securities, setting both a fundraising goal and deadline.  Individual investors will be able to purchase up to $5,000 in equity from a single business. In order for the round of fundraising to be approved, businesses will have to achieve their fundraising goal by the deadline they initially set. Read the legislation…