SSTI Digest

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel recently announced the Chicago Anchors for a Strong Economy (CASE) program — an initiative to connect local small- and medium-sized business to a network of Chicago’s leading anchor institutions (e.g., hospitals, universities, cultural institutions, corporations). The CASE program is intended to create economic opportunities for local suppliers across all industries, including science and tech companies, by fostering strategic relationships with anchor institutions and equipping them with the necessary tools to successfully compete for contracts with these anchor institutions. A pilot program between the University of Chicago and 10 local companies has been operating since mid-2013 as a proof-of-concept for the city-wide program.  

SSTI Excellence in TBED award winners produce real results that are changing the landscape of their communities, expanding infrastructure to grow high-tech sectors and improving the competitiveness of their regions. Their efforts haven’t gone unnoticed in the broader innovation community. Over the past couple of months, award winners have grabbed headlines – and funding – for their impressive work. U.S. Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker stopped by Clemson University’s Center for Automotive Research to tout its success in workforce development. In St. Louis, Monsanto recently awarded $2.5 million to BioSTL to support bioscience startups and, in Arizona, a $1 million grant will help fund ASU accelerator programs.

Commerce Secretary Touts CU-ICAR Model

In response to declining appropriations and the termination of the Space Shuttle program, NASA has had to re-orient its approach to commercial partnerships. Over the past decade, NASA has turned to private partnerships to further the agency’s goals of space research and exploration. This same impulse has driven NASA to create regional partnerships to cultivate private space industry clusters and drive the development of the Commercial Crew program, which is highlighted as a core component of the agency’s FY15 budget proposal. These efforts have changed NASA’s role in regional, high-tech economic development from that of a research laboratory to a direct partner.

In his FY15 budget, President Obama proposed a sweeping, multi-agency push for new research and improved infrastructure to combat the effects of global climate change. The largest piece of the president’s climate effort is a $1 billion Climate Resistance Fund, intended to fund climate-change preparedness at the federal, state and local level. Though the budget has not found much support in Congress, the administration has begun moving forward with other parts of the climate strategy, launching a Climate Data Initiative to make potentially valuable climate data available to entrepreneurs developing climate-related products.

After the last American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) obligations ran out in FY10, federal obligations for science and engineering at U.S. universities and colleges fell by 11 percent, according to the National Science Foundation (NSF).  Between FY2010-11, federal agency obligations fell by $31.4 billion in current dollars, though excluding ARRA funds, obligations actually rose by $1.2 billion. R&D obligations fell 10.6 percent, a decline that had its largest impact on funding for R&D-related equipment, facilities and land. Read the report…

External validation through an Excellence in TBED award certifies the superior quality of your initiative, lending independent credentials to your program as stakeholders and funders consider future investments. SSTI’s open call for applications for the 2014 awards program is April 16. Share with us the important work you are doing to support regional economies through efforts to: expand and commercialize research, increase access to capital, build entrepreneurial capacity, and improve the competitiveness of existing industries. We’ll also recognize a newer initiative for a creative approach in design or implementation. Learn more: http://www.sstiawards.org/.

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.