SSTI Digest

Americans have a strong level of confidence in scientists and scientific institutions overall, as SSTI reported in a Digest article in December 2023. A new NSF report reviews recent literature about public perceptions, awareness, and information sources for science, and reports strong support for science. However, in their extensive literature review, the authors found evidence of current uncertainty and varying levels of awareness and acceptance of newer technologies, such as AI, robotics, and automotive automation. The authors conclude that there is a pattern among Americans of not knowing much about science and not being very involved in science activities. “That pattern suggests that direct exposure to how S&T professionals conduct their work to generate peer-reviewed research publications has been limited among Americans, and future changes in such exposure could hold implications for Americans’ relationships with S&T institutions.” Depending on the trends, those implications could be either negative or positive. Public perceptions of newer science and technology The authors reviewed literature on newer science and technology topics that…

More than five months into fiscal year 2024, Congress has approved an agreement covering six of the twelve annual appropriations bills. Many tech-based economic development (TBED) programs received funding equal to the FY 2023 base appropriation—a strong sign of support for a year in which Congress agreed to return to FY 2022 overall spending levels and many programs across the federal government, therefore, saw cuts. However, because Congress has not agreed to provide again the supplemental funding that fueled robust spending last year, the FY 2024 budget actually provides hundreds of millions of dollars less in total TBED spending than was appropriated in FY 2023. Congress adopted the SSTI Innovation Advocacy Council’s recommended Build to Scale funding level of $50 million, matching the FY 2023 level and above the White House’s request of $45 million. For Tech Hubs, Congress provided $41 million, matching the FY 2023 base appropriation but well below last year’s $500 million in total funding, the White House’s request of $4 billion (with $2.5 billion to be used in FY 2024), and the Innovation Advocacy Council’s recommendation of $2.5 billion. The National…

In a webinar last week, staff from BioSTL and SSTI shared their organizations’ use of Salesforce for grant management and reporting. It facilitated a lively discussion among the more than 100 attendees about technical and practical challenges and solutions for the platform. The presentation and recording are now available here. In a poll last year, participants in the Tech-based Economic Development (TBED) Community of Practice identified Salesforce as the most commonly used customer management system (CMS) in the field (followed by Excel and with HubSpot and Microsoft Dynamics as other common solutions). SSTI previously shared a demonstration of AirTable’s use for managing TBED initiatives and seeks organizations willing to discuss other platforms. To volunteer your experience or to get more information about the TBED Community of Practice, contact tbedcop@ssti.org.   This article was prepared by SSTI using Federal funds under award ED22HDQ3070129 from the Economic Development Administration, U.S. Department of Commerce. The statements, findings, conclusions, and recommendations are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the…

Last week, the National Science Foundation announced it would provide $21.4 million to four projects at emerging research institutions (ERIs) to advance research administration infrastructure and support systems at non-R1 institutions. The awards are from NSF’s Growing Research Access for Nationally Transformative Equity and Diversity (GRANTED) program, which, according to the NSF announcement, “aims to help R2, R3, undergraduate and community colleges become more competitive against more well-funded research institutions in national research funding opportunities.” NSF can extend this funding to non-R-1 institutions because of the CHIPS and Science Act provision for a new designation for ERIs. This provision encouraged federal programs that targeted Minority Serving Institutions and Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR) jurisdictions to begin including ERIs in program eligibility. (See this SSTI Digest article published in May 2023 for more on the new designation and a map of ERI locations.) ERIs are higher education institutions that have established undergraduate or graduate programs but conduct less than $50 million in…

Why do some universities excel at translating their research into economic impact while others lag? A recent NBER working paper explores the factors influencing the variation in universities' commercialization activities. The authors follow the career movements of 31,000 academic researchers across 1,100 U.S. universities and analyze how the situations at the different host universities may have influenced an increase or decrease in these researchers’ subsequent patent filings and company formations. The authors present three key findings. First, moving to a university with a stronger commercialization infrastructure, such as one with a technology transfer office and venture capital network increases the likelihood of an academic's research leading to patents and company formation by 15-25%. This increase suggests universities play a crucial role in fostering innovation and technology transfer. Second, universities within technology clusters benefit from proximity to resources, talent, and potential partners, further boosting commercialization potential. Third, the study shows variable success rates within institutions, suggesting that specific…

In this week’s continuing coverage of gubernatorial addresses as they impact the innovation economy, governors from Illinois, Mississippi, and New Hampshire discussed their state’s past economic, educational, and workforce achievements and laid out their vision for this year, while New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy presented his proposed Fiscal Year 2025 budget, building upon his State of State address and proposed initiatives delivered last month. Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker called for a $700 million investment in quantum (see separate article), Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves focused on how to make his state the new manufacturing hub for America, and New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy provided more details on his proposal for AI-focused activities. In New Hampshire, Gov. Chris Sununu called for continued fiscal prudence, bipartisan solutions, and empowering the private sector to maintain his state’s current and future successes. The following highlights have been excerpted from State of the States or budget addresses given between Feb. 14, 2024, and Feb. 27, 2024. Additional addresses and states will be covered in future Digest issues. With the start of the new year,…

Leaders within the largest city in the United States, and one of the most influential in the world, recognize the daunting challenges resulting from New York City’s vulnerability to climate change—evidenced already in violent storms, flooding, and rising sea levels—as well as the economic opportunity that comes in combating the negative impacts of that change and reducing the city’s contributions to further temperature rise. As a result, it should not surprise Digest readers that the Green Economy Action Plan released by New York City Mayor Eric Adams on February 28 is saturated with innovation and TBED-centered initiatives. Altogether, the plan commits the Adams administration to work on 63 specific actions across five key goals. The goals include key pieces to a green economy that typically don’t generate headlines, such as launching the use of the newly developed circular construction guidelines, starting with the SPARC Kips Bay, a $1 billion, two million-square-foot life sciences innovation center. From the economic development perspective, one anticipated outcome of the plan’s implementation, the mayor projects, would be the creation of nearly 400,000 “…

Furthering his previous calls for the state to become "the Silicon Valley of quantum development" and part of a sweeping quest to remake the state a hub for the future of semiconductors, quantum, and AI, Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker recommended $500 million in capital investments to build and maintain a regional quantum computing hub as part of his new fiscal year (2025) budget. Coupled with a previous $200 million Rebuild Illinois investment in the Chicago Quantum Exchange (CQE), the administration’s proposed investment seeks to build a quantum campus to attract private investment and create jobs.  "We already were establishing ourselves as a leading hub for quantum development—now we have the opportunity to take it a big step further," Pritzker told Axios.  Within the $500 million proposed, press reports indicate Pritzker has earmarked $200 million for a shared cryogenic facility for quantum research and development, $100 million to support infrastructure and site development for the quantum campus, and $200 million for matching funds. While that breakout is not in budget documents, presumably the matching funds could be used for Illinois’ effort to…

Total postsecondary enrollment is down 5% from fall 2019 to fall 2023 due to a 6% drop in undergraduate students. While undergraduates are down, graduate students have surpassed pre-pandemic enrollment numbers by 4%. Enrollments in undergraduate and graduate certificates are up significantly from pre-pandemic values (16% and 21%), while enrollment in associate degrees are down more than any other undergraduate credential (-14%). Continue reading for a national and state-level analysis of the recently released fall 2023 enrollment estimates from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center (Clearinghouse). Note that fall 2023 data are estimates and may change. All data and methodological notes can be found on Clearinghouse’s website. Only total enrollment numbers are available for Wyoming, while all other states have undergraduate and graduate breakdowns. See Clearinghouse’s methodological notes for more data limitations.   National enrollment trends At the onset of the pandemic, from fall 2019-2020, postsecondary enrollment dropped by 2.3%, followed by an additional 2.5% drop the following year (2020-2021). Undergraduate enrollment fell…

The Maryland Technology Development Corporation (TEDCO), created by the Maryland General Assembly in 1998 to facilitate the transfer and commercialization of technology from research universities and federal labs and to help create and grow technology-based businesses, has created nearly $2.7 billion in statewide economic activity as of 2023. Their recently published independent economic impact study shows details of the impacts, as determined by the study authors at the University of Baltimore's Jacob France Institute. The study details the contributions of TEDCO to the state of Maryland. Study findings showed that: In 2021, the direct job creation impact of 442 portfolio companies supported by TEDCO's six core research and investment vehicles was 10,433. This number of TEDCO-supported jobs represents an increase that is 4.25 times greater than the number in 2013. These companies have increased their economic impact from $2.3 billion in 2021 to $2.7 billion in 2023. This increase in TEDCO-supported economic activity is almost 4.8 times greater than it was in 2013  Portfolio companies have generated an estimated $140.3 million in state and local government…

The recent pandemic and the government's response may have catapulted community colleges toward deeper participation in economic development. “Community colleges have been interested and involved in economic development for decades,” said Thomas Brock, director of the Community College Research Center at Columbia University. "That's part of their core mission. But what is different now is that there's a lot more federal money on the table through the CHIPS Act and the (Bipartisan) Infrastructure (Law). Community colleges are entrepreneurial, and they will take advantage of those resources to the extent they're available." Rebecca Corbin, president and CEO of the National Association of Community Colleges for Entrepreneurship (NACCE), agrees that federal funding is proving to be a catalyst for community colleges. She observed that with the pandemic-era federal funding, they are engaging in deeper collaborations with the surrounding innovation ecosystem. “From my perspective, since the CHIPS Act has come into play, we've seen some great examples of community colleges (helping to build ecosystems).” Deeper collaborations move beyond basic levels where “…

Federally funded basic research conducted at American universities grew steadily from about $10 billion in 1991 to just under $50 billion in 2020 (in constant 2022 dollars). And since the passage of the Bayh-Dole Act in 1980, universities have played an increasing role in the patenting and commercialization of their discoveries. Patents to US universities increased from 440 in 1981 to 8706 in 2020. U.S. universities licensed or optioned more than 10,000 patented inventions to the private sector in 2020. How does this large taxpayer investment in public science and the inventions that result from it affect corporate research and development? A recent research summary from the National Bureau of Economic Research, “The Effect of Public Science on Corporate R&D,” examines the relationships between corporate R&D and three components of public science: knowledge, human capital, and invention. The authors’ perspective is that in addition to producing scientific knowledge, universities also produce trained researchers and inventions that can be used by startups or licensed to established firms. New knowledge generated from university research may lessen the need for…