SSTI Digest

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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:

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).”

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?

The White House announced on February 9 that the administration expects to invest over $5 billion in semiconductor-related research, development, and workforce needs. The $5 billion will flow through the National Semiconductor Technology Center (NSTC), a public-private entity created to handle the funds. Friday’s announcement established the NSTC as a public-private consortium of the Secretaries of Commerce, Defense, and Energy, the Director of the National Science Foundation, and Natcast. Natcast will operate the NSTC consortium.

In this week’s continuing coverage of gubernatorial addresses as they impact the innovation economy, governors from Connecticut, Maryland, and Wyoming discussed their state’s past economic and educational achievements and laid out their vision for this year as the states return to revenue and funding normalcy after years of federal pandemic aid ends. Connecticut’s governor announced that UConn and Yale are collaborating on quantum computing research, and he called for the funding of a biotech hub in New Haven. Maryland’s governor called for investments in the industries of the future (with proposed funding for life sciences, biotech, data centers, and cybersecurity). Wyoming’s governor discussed the state’s position in an “all of the above American energy policy.”

The following highlights have been excerpted from State of the States or budget addresses given between Feb. 7, 2024, and Feb. 13, 2024. Additional addresses and states will be covered in future Digest issues.