SSTI Digest

$10M Donation Funds Johns Hopkins Biomed Facility, Research Park

The Institute for Basic Biomedical Sciences at the Johns Hopkins University received a commitment of $10 million from the John G. Rangos Sr. Family Charitable Foundation. The institute - intended to provide space for interdisciplinary biological and medical research - will be housed in the first building constructed in the new life sciences park in East Baltimore, an $800 million urban redevelopment project. Groundbreaking for the building was held April 17 in the 80-acre park managed by East Baltimore Development Inc.

Regional migration patterns between 2000 and 2004 revealed a continuing net average annual in-migration in the South and the West and a net average annual out-migration in the Midwest and the Northeast, according to the Census Bureau’s latest report. Domestic Net Migration in the United States: 2000 to 2004 details recent patterns of population redistribution throughout the U.S. and provides migration data from 1990-2000 to show a historical perspective in migration patterns.

On a state level ­ and consistent with regional data ­ states in the South and the West experienced the highest net in-migration (Table 2 of the report). Florida had the largest in-migration of 190,894, followed by Arizona (66,344) Nevada (50,803), Georgia (41,298), North Carolina (39,137) and Texas (36,566).

Carolina Cruz is the first director of the Louisiana Immersive Technologies Enterprise, a $20 million research facility developed jointly by the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and the Louisiana Economic Development Authority.

Past SSTI conference sponsor ANGLE Technology Group named Mark DeSantis to serve as managing director of consulting and management and Lisa Smith to become vice president of marketing.

Lenzie Harcum, former program director at the University of North Carolina SBTDC, is now assistant vice president of biosciences at the NYC Economic Development Corporation.

Carolina Cruz is the first director of the Louisiana Immersive Technologies Enterprise, a $20 million research facility developed jointly by the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and the Louisiana Economic Development Authority.

Past SSTI conference sponsor ANGLE Technology Group named Mark DeSantis to serve as managing director of consulting and management and Lisa Smith to become vice president of marketing.

Lenzie Harcum, former program director at the University of North Carolina SBTDC, is now assistant vice president of biosciences at the NYC Economic Development Corporation.

After seven months on the job, Connecticut Innovations President and CEO Chandler Howard is leaving to pursue an opportunity to establish a community bank in New Haven.

Over the past six years, SSTI has dedicated a portion of the Digest to coverage on the legislative priorities of governors across the nation through the Tech Talkin' Govs series. As they say, talk is cheap. So this year, we are extending that coverage to track how the Governors' proposals fared in the respective legislative sessions. In the coming months, as many sessions come to an end, SSTI will take a look back on the governors' state-of-the-state, budget, and inaugural addresses and report the good, the bad and the ugly of the 2006 legislative decisions.

Georgia

It could be frustration at the lack of action by the federal government, displeasure with the direction of national policy or a sense of urgency and need, but states are increasingly taking matters into their own hands when it comes to many major issues. Examples abound, including states taking the lead on dealing with global warming, energy policy, health care, food quality assurance, stem cell research, broadband coverage and even foreign trade. Washington Gov. Christine Gregoire may have summed up this emerging Neo/post-federalism movement late last month when she said, "Washington is its own small nation in this new world economy."

Successful companies are forced to change business strategies as market realities shift. It happens all of the time. Browse the business section of your local bookstore and you'll see dozens of titles preaching the need for companies to adopt, adapt and innovate. The continuing restructuring of the U.S. durable manufacturing sector, as alluded to in the Useful Stats piece below, is a vivid example of the importance of abandoning old mindsets for industry: change or die.

The U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) recently published its 2005 estimates of state personal income. According to the release, growth in U.S. per capita income slowed in 2005 increasing 4.6 percent in 2005, down from 5 percent growth in 2004. Regionally, the most significant increases in per capita income accompanied faster population growth, occurring in the Southwest states of Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas and the Rocky Mountain states of Idaho, Montana, Utah and Wyoming. Florida, Nevada and Virginia round out the top 10 states for percent change in per capita income.

We're not sure how useful these stats really are, but given the political proclivity of so many of our readers and the upcoming gubernatorial elections this fall in 36 states, we thought we'd share a link from SurveyUSA.com presenting the current approval ratings for all 50 governors. The survey results, sponsored by many media sources, are presented in "net job approval" order, which is determined by subtracting a governor's disapproval rating from the percentage of respondents who approve of the governor's performance. While the unweighted average net job approval score is 11 percent, governors in 14 states have negative net approval scores. Nine of these same states occupy rankings in the bottom 16 spots on SSTI's five-year change in per capita income table mentioned above. SurveyUSA's table is available at: http://www.surveyusa.com/50State2006/50StateGovernor060412Net.htm