SSTI Digest

Texas Gov. Rick Perry unveiled his budget proposal for fiscal year 2008-09 with an additional $300 million to recapitalize the state’s Emerging Technology Fund (ETF). The program provides loans and grants to commercialization projects with ties to state universities, and to create research centers in key technology areas. The funding would represent a significant expansion of the program, which received $200 million when it was established in 2005 and no new funding in 2006.

 

Over the past 27 years, the Bayh-Dole Act has been frequently cited as critical for university tech transfer in the U.S. The Act allows universities to assume ownership over the intellectual property (IP) produced on campuses, whenever that property derives from research funded in whole or in part by the federal government. The possibility of financial returns from licensing agreements or on the sale of IP gives institutions an important incentive to engage in applied research and move their discoveries to market.

 

The U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) recently announced it will provide $65 million in new grants under the Workforce Innovation in Regional Economic Development (WIRED) Initiative.



Launched in February 2006, the WIRED initiative focuses on the role of talent development in driving regional economic competitiveness, job growth and new opportunities. The goal of WIRED, as described by DOL's Employment and Training Administration, is to expand employment and advancement opportunities for U.S. workers and catalyze the creation of high-skill and high-wage opportunities in regional economies. Regions across the country are provided with ongoing technical assistance, in addition to grant funding, to help achieve these goals.

Looking for that perfect professional development opportunity for you or your staff. If so, the SSTI Web calendar of events should prove useful in your search.



By visiting www.ssti.org/calendar.htm, you can view more than 170 technology-based economic development events.



Events include:

Earlier this month Pennsylvania Gov. Edward Rendell announced a broad state strategy to improve the state’s energy independence, support alternative energy business, and reduce the state’s environmental impact. The key element of the new state plan is an $850 million Energy Independence Fund, designed to reduce energy costs for consumers and shift the state’s usage toward clean and renewable sources. Gov. Rendell hopes the plan will save Pennsylvania consumers $10 billion over the next 10 years by lowering energy costs and reducing consumption.

 

The governor’s Energy Independence Fund will support the development and adoption of clean energy technologies across the state and in consumer households. Activities supported by the fund include:

• $106 million – Venture capital, grants and loans for the expansion of energy companies
  • $56 million – Energy Independence Greenhouse
  • $50 million – Energy Independence Capital

Energy giant BP has announced that the University of California at Berkeley, in partnership with the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, will receive a total of $500 million to host a research center dedicated to developing biofuel technologies. The Energy Biosciences Institute (EBI) will conduct both basic and applied biological research relevant to energy. BP and the university plan to launch research programs this summer.

 

A recent study completed for the Small Business Administration (SBA) concludes that small business establishment births are the single-largest determinant of the growth rate of gross state product (GSP), state personal income, and total state employment using data from the years 1988-2002. The authors contend state efforts to promote the creation of small businesses will generate more economic growth then any other policy option included in their models. They calculated that increasing small business births by 5 percent increased the growth of the gross state product by 0.47 percent. These same conclusions would have been reached if small businesses were defined as having less than 500 employees or less than 100 employees, the study indicates.

 

Rapid growth in the number of international patents filed by northeast Asian nations during 2006 has resulted in a shift of positions for the top-performing nations, according to the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). With 34.1 percent, the U.S. maintained its global dominance with 49,555 patent filings. The figure represents an increase of 6.1 percent over America’s 2005 total; the U.S. rate of growth is slower than the 6.4 percent growth in total world filings.

 

Japan, maintaining its second place position, filed 26,906 patent applications, 18.5 percent of the global total of 145,300. Germany remained in third with 11.7 percent of the total.

 

The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, in partnership with the Richard Florida Creativity Group (RFCG), recently announced the formation of the Knight Creative Communities Initiative in three metropolitan areas of the country: Charlotte; Duluth, Minn./Superior, Wisc.; and, Tallahassee. The goal of the initiative, utilizing Dr. Florida’s theories on the importance of creativity and innovation for economic growth, is to produce through community dialogue a vision to enhance each region’s environment for ingenuity.

 

Increasing federal funding for life science research is one of the most significant ingredients for improving a state’s position in building a strong biotech and biomedical sector. As appropriations for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) were increasing annually – as they did in the last half of the 1990s and the first few years of this decade – this was not a zero-sum game. All states could win.

 

That is less likely to be the case if increases in NIH appropriations barely keep pace with inflation as Congress and the Administration shift research priorities toward other areas of science and engineering.

 

So how did everyone do during times of plenty? To answer this, SSTI has compiled a table of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) awards in total dollars and state rankings from fiscal years 2001-05. The states, ranked by percent change over the five-year period, show South Dakota (132.28), Louisiana (115.52), Montana (113.13), Indiana (96.61) and North Dakota (96.60) posted the greatest gains.