SSTI Digest

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recently launched two Notices of Funding Opportunity (NOFOs): the National Clean Investment Fund and the Clean Communities Investment Accelerator. The National Clean Investment fund provides $14 billion to provide accessible, affordable financing for tens of thousands of clean technology projects nationwide. The Clean Communities Investment Accelerator provides $6 billion funding and technical assistance to public, quasi-public, not-for-profit, and nonprofit community lenders working in low-income and disadvantaged communities The National Clean Investment Fund will provide grants to support from two to three national clean financing institutions to partner with the private sector. At least 40% of the funds from the National Clean Investment Fund will be dedicated to low-income and disadvantaged communities, including rural communities, Tribal communities, communities with environmental justice concerns, energy communities, and persistent poverty counties. The deadline to apply to this grant competition is October 12, 2023. EPA intends to make two or three awards under this competition. Applicants must be eligible…

Over the past two decades, business has done most of the heavy lifting for research and development (R&D) funding. Calculated in the dollar value of 2012, business funding increased from $10.4 billion in 2000 to an estimated $36.0 billion in 2021. The National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics (NCSES) keeps track of these types of statistics, and the above data is from Business Sector Increases Funding for Basic Research, one of three InfoCharts released last month. The “Business Sector Increases Funding for Basic Research,” InfoChart, written by NCSES’ Gary Anderson, explains that although federal funding increased from 2000 to 2005, it has remained stagnant since then at near or below $40 billion. Whether looking at a longer or a shorter timeframe, the trend of declining federal funds is apparent. From 1961–70, on average, the federal government funded 70% of basic research, and the business sector funded less than 20%. But, by 2021, the federal government only funded 40% of basic research. At the same time, the business sector’s share of funding had increased to 36%. The increase in business funding represents a return to the 1950s…

Over the last month, the Department of Energy (DOE), National Science Foundation (NSF), and National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have released plans for complying with a 2022 White House policy that requires scientific papers resulting from federally funded research to be freely available upon publication, sunsetting the current one-year embargo period by 2025. The 2023 DOE Public Access Plan describes how DOE-funded research and digital data will become more open and available to the public. Building on the previous DOE Public Access Plan of July 2014, the new Plan charts a path to: Provide free, immediate access to peer-reviewed, scholarly publications; Provide quick access to scientific data displayed in or underlying publications and increased access to other data; Use persistent identifiers (PIDs) for research outputs, researchers, organizations, and awards to help ensure scientific and research integrity. NSF Public Access Plan 2.0 includes efforts to: Maintain the NSF Public Access Repository, where NSF-supported publications and other research products are publicly available.  Fund…

The Economic Development Administration (EDA) has updated its Comprehensive Economic Development Strategy (CEDS) Content Guidelines, effective April 2023. CEDS are strategy-driven plans for economic development prepared through a regionally owned planning process. Designed to build regional capacity and economic resilience, an active CEDS is a prerequisite for EDA designation as an Economic Development District (EDD), which serves as the main conduit through which TBED organizations may seek funding from EDA’s Public Works and Economic Adjustment Assistance program.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) is expanding a network of research centers across the country to translate university-based R&D into new, and hopefully, better advanced materials. In late June, NSF announced the distribution of $162 million to support the creation of nine more Materials Research Science & Engineering Centers (MRSECs), bringing the total number of centers to twenty. Each of the new centers will receive $18 million over six years. NSF reports the latest MRSECs will expand the centers' portfolios to pursue a broad range of research projects to unlock new capabilities in several areas: semiconductors, artificial intelligence, biotechnology, sustainable energy sources and storage, advanced manufacturing, quantum computing and sensing, and other areas critical for U.S. leadership in materials research. In addition to enabling new commercial opportunities and industries in the U.S., the centers will train students and early career researchers who will become tomorrow's scientific and technical leaders. The nine new MRSECs are the: Illinois Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)…

The Senate appropriations committee advanced a set of FY 2024 funding bills this morning that largely continue level funding from FY 2023. While the full bill text is not yet available, a press release about the commerce and science bill identified $200 million for the Engines program at NSF, $175 million for the Manufacturing Extension Partnership at NIST, and $50 million for Build to Scale, $41 million for Tech Hubs, and $2.5 million for the STEM Talent Challenge at EDA. These amounts are all inline with the funding provided through regular FY 2023 appropriations but do not yet include any of the supplementary amounts included in last year’s omnibus (e.g., Tech Hubs was funded at a total of $500 million in FY 2023); see SSTI’s article on FY 2023 funding for details. The House subcommittee overseeing commerce and science funding is expected to advance its FY 2024 bill tomorrow morning. Senate appropriations also advanced funding for SBA this morning, but program funding levels are unavailable.

SSTI’s Annual Conference is in Atlanta this Sept. 6-8. The event will feature numerous opportunities to connect with your peers from across the country who are working to strengthen their regional innovation economies through roundtables focused on specific areas of practice and workshops on communications, building stronger organizations, and diversity, equity, and inclusion. The entire conference is available for a registration fee of just $390. Reserve your spot today! An overview of the schedule can be found below. Visit 2023.ssticonference.org for the full agenda. September 6 Content options include a full-day introduction to tech-based economic development, a workshop on organization management, and roundtables for attendees to meet with, and learn from, peers working across the country on risk capital and higher education. September 7 Morning plenary sessions will highlight big thinkers and innovation trends. The afternoon will include a financing forum for attendees to learn about programs that fund TBED and include roundtables on state programs, venture development organizations, and entrepreneurship development. …

Did you use the Recompete Mapping Tool to check your eligibility for this new EDA funding opportunity when the fact sheet and map were first released? If you did, and you got the response, “Contact your local economic development office” don’t stop there! EDA has updated its mapping tool in the past few days to reflect significant flexibility in program eligibility. These changes mean that many more regions may be able to successfully compete for strategy development awards and, ultimately, implementation awards. For areas that were previously marked as partially eligible, the mapping tool now directs users to the Census Tract Viewer, which helps to better-identify regions that can still compete for program funds. Specifically, this viewer shows that your local community may qualify if it: is located within, but does not fully cover, an ineligible local labor market, and contains a subset of the area served by the unit of local government that has five or more contiguous census tracts that each individually have a prime-age employment gap (PAEG) of at least 5% and median annual household income of no more than $75,000, and is contained within the identified…

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has reduced its funding for the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) programs. The cut at the Office of Science—the agency’s primary program administrator—appears to be about 35%. The change resulted from congressional direction that the agency had miscalculated its SBIR set-aside and is intended to make the Office of Science’s calculation more consistent with that of the other programs in DOE. The reduction will likely result in tougher competition for SBIR/STTR awards at the agency in the foreseeable future. Congress directed the department to make this change in its FY 2022 appropriations bill. The text of the congressional instruction,[1] the “Department is directed to use the definition of research” from the SBIR legislation, seems innocuous. However, it appears that this instruction was included because DOE had been including activity in its calculation of its extramural research budget that the appropriations committee does not believe belongs there. This recalculation of extramural research is what is driving the cuts. The calculation of extramural research is critical…

If a recent forecast from McKinsey & Company is correct, climate change isn’t the only rough ride ahead over the next decade for regional and national economies. “The next several years will take us on a roller-coaster ride featuring fast-paced innovation and technological breakthroughs that force us to recalibrate our understanding of [generative artificial intelligence’s] impact on our work and our lives,” the team of researchers from McKinsey writes in The economic potential of generative AI: the next productivity frontier. Policymakers, higher education leaders, TBED practitioners, and urban planners would be wise to take notice: no aspect of regional innovation policy portfolios is likely to be untouched. In many sectors, positions requiring creative professionals and knowledge workers, the key labor components of technology-based economic development (TBED), are most at risk. Additionally, the McKinsey researchers note, “generative AI increases the potential for [disruption by] technical automation most in occupations requiring higher degrees of educational attainment.” The need for, and nature of, research parks, innovation districts, and…

NIST has released a plan to make its scientific data and publications more readily available and accessible, following a memo from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) instructing all government agencies to do so. NIST has presented its plan in its June 30 Draft for Public Comment, now open for comment. Comments may be submitted until 11:59 p.m. Eastern Time on August 14 here. The draft plan includes updates to the agency’s existing 2014 plan, which includes requirements for NIST to provide ways for the public to access and download, free of charge, agency-funded research publications and related data. The publications and data must be available immediately, if legally possible, or up to 12 months following publication. NIST must also provide a portal for public access to data associated with manuscripts, stand-alone datasets, and other research outputs. Thus, researchers must allow manuscripts and data related to a manuscript to be publicly available when published. Also, data acquired via a NIST award must be made publicly available within three years of the end of the award unless the data is protected by legal, privacy, ethical,…

The Acting Secretary of Labor (Secretary) requests nominations of qualified candidates to be considered for appointment to the Advisory Committee on Apprenticeship (ACA) for the 2023-2025 membership term. Registered Apprenticeship is highly dependent on its stakeholders' and partners' engagement and involvement for its operational effectiveness. Apart from the ACA, there is no single organization or group with the broad representation of employers, labor unions, and public entities available to consider the complexities and relationship of apprenticeship activities to other training efforts or to provide advice on such matters to the Secretary, Candidates for consideration to be members of the ACA must represent a constituent base connected to apprenticeship activities. ACA Members should also have: A demonstrated interest in the national apprenticeship system. The ability and readiness to devote time and effort to attend all public ACA meetings, actively participate in ACA deliberations, advocate for the apprenticeship system, and participate in planned member activities. Appointed ACA members will meet publicly quarterly. Successful nominees will be…