SSTI Digest

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." The governor's comments accompanied the release of the 110-page report from the Global Competitiveness Council Gov. Gregoire established a year ago. Rising to the Challenge of Global Competition summarizes the findings, observations and recommendations from the council comprised of 46 industry, utility, political, research, educational and civic leaders for the state. Rising to the Challenge draws its urgency from the writings of Thomas Friedman and Richard…

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. Play a quick word association game ending with the word "bureaucracy," and it's pretty likely you didn't associate the word with flexibility, adaptability, innovative or any synonyms for these. Changing philosophies within government is a slow, arduous task. It typically takes a catastrophic event - such as a deep recession, natural disaster or change of political leadership in the legislative and executive branches of government - before many real changes have a chance of being enacted. The final report of Washington's Global Competitiveness Council (see article above) is intended, in part, to help change the individual…

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. Using BEA data, SSTI has compiled a 50-state table presenting percent change in per capita income from 2000-2005 and ranking the states using constant 2000 dollars. The District of Columbia ranked the highest with a 19.88 percent change over the five-year period, followed by Wyoming (13.98 percent), Montana (13.04 percent), North Dakota (10.29 percent) and New Mexico (10.16 percent). The BEA reports Wyoming’s strong performance is accredited to the mining industry, which contributed more than two percentage…

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

States and regions across the U.S. are continuing to make significant investments and implement policies to capitalize on the growing biosciences sector. However, a challenge they face in coming years is a leveling off of federal bioscience R&D dollars, concludes a recent report prepared by Battelle, SSTI and PMP Consulting. The report, Growing the Nation's Bioscience Sector: State Bioscience Initiatives in 2006, is a follow-up to the 2004 report Laboratories of Innovation: State Bioscience Initiatives 2004, prepared for the Biotechnology Industry Organization (see the June 7, 2004 issue of the Digest). The authors developed data to measure the size, composition and geographic distribution of the biosciences across the country. Since that report, new bioscience discoveries have continued to fuel the growth of the bioscience sector, and states and regions have responded with an increased commitment to building an infrastructure that encourages innovation and applications of bioscience research discoveries in multiple industries, the report states. In an effort…

Despite all the press generated each time a state commits multimillion portions of its tobacco settlement distribution toward R&D and technology-based economic development (TBED), readers may be surprised to learn economic development activities captured only 4 percent of the total payments in 2005, according to a new report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO). Unfortunately, the report reflects one of the agonizing realities of how poorly federal agencies understand what states are doing to support the nation's innovation system: Much of what is generally accepted by the field as investments to encourage or support the knowledge-based economy is buried in several other categories of the report, including health related, education and even general purposes. Released today, Tobacco Settlement: States' Allocations of Fiscal Year 2005 and Expected Fiscal Year 2006 Payments presents the state-by-state breakdown of how 46 states have used monies paid by the major tobacco firms as a result of the Master Settlement Agreement (MSA). The report is based on an annual…

For the 12th consecutive year, the University of California tops all universities for the most patents for inventions, according to a list recently released by the U.S Patent and Trademark Office. The preliminary list reveals the top 13 U.S. universities receiving the most utility patents during calendar year 2005. All campuses are included in each school's total. While the University of California's 390 patents in 2005 earned it top honors again, the figure reflects an 8 percent decline from the institution's 424 total in 2004 and 11 percent less than 2003. The California Institute of Technology experienced an even greater drop in patent activity between 2004 and 2005, slipping 25 percent to third overall with 101 patents. Massachusetts Institute of Technology moved into second with 136, a 3 percent increase over 2004. [Editor's Note: The 2005 figures for U.C. and CalTech are the lowest for both schools since before 2001 (earliest year available), generating some interesting questions regarding possible causes (dot-com bubble, depth of the recession…

Increasingly states are making it easier for high school students to participate in college courses while still attending high school. The goal of dual enrollment is to encourage more students to attend college, giving them a leg up on a degree. A new report by the Kentucky Council on Postsecondary Education suggests the efforts are not working in Kentucky. Encouraging dual enrollment programs to provide academic rather than technical coursework may increase the matriculation rates of dually enrolled students, though. Dual enrollment has doubled in Kentucky over the last five years. However, findings of a recent study examining dual enrollment data between 2001-02 and 2004-05 indicate that dual credit programs do not appear to enhance overall college matriculation rates. According to the study, these rates vary among those students taking academic courses and those taking occupational courses. While students who took academic courses did matriculate at slightly higher rates than the overall high school population, the majority of students who took…

Using data from the Small Business Administration’s Office of Advocacy, SSTI has prepared a table presenting business churning statistics and rankings for all 50 states and the District of Columbia for 2004. Business churning, a measure of new firm births and existing firm deaths as a share of total firms (small businesses with employees), is seen as a major driver of innovation and growth. Churning increases as the number of new start-ups and existing business failures per year increase. There were an estimated 899,688 new business start-ups and 930,452 business terminations throughout the U.S. in 2004, resulting in a national business churning average of 26.10 percent - up 6.3 percent from 2003. Washington saw the largest churning rate at 40.57 percent, followed by Nevada (39.62 percent), Utah (38.89 percent), New Jersey (33.99 percent) and Idaho (31.92 percent). South Dakota, on the other hand, experienced the national low in churning at 17.17 percent. Louisiana (20.85 percent), Kansas (20.85 percent), Iowa (19.73 percent) and Ohio (19.38…

South Dakota Gov. Mike Rounds selected Richard Benda as the new Secretary for the Department of Tourism and State Development. Bob Dayton was named president of the Delaware BioScience Association. Effective in May, Ken Janoski will be the president and CEO of BioGenerator, a nonprofit in St. Louis that helps scientists commercialize their discoveries. Medical Alley and MNBIO, two organizations that merged in 2005 to promote medical sciences in Minnesota, have changed their name LifeScience Alley. The Maryland Department of Business and Economic Development appointed Christine Plater as its new director of small business programs. The South Dakota Biotech Industry Association, a new resource for biotech companies in the state, has formed.

South Dakota Gov. Mike Rounds selected Richard Benda as the new Secretary for the Department of Tourism and State Development.

Bob Dayton was named president of the Delaware BioScience Association.