SSTI Digest

The year-long battle between Lafayette Utilities System (LUS) and competitors BellSouth Louisiana and Cox Communications over the utility company's proposed Fiber for the Future project came to an end last month when voters approved the $125 million fiber optics plan by a vote of 62 percent to 38 percent.

The LUS Initiative, called Fiber-to-the-Home (FTTH), proposes to bring fiber optics to every home and business in Lafayette in order to deliver cable TV, telephone, and Internet services at a cost of 20 percent less than current providers. A special election was called last month to decide whether the city could issue $125 million worth of bonds to fund the project, according to The Advocate.

Increasing and modernizing university research capacity is a priority for many states. Contrary to programmatic or operational appropriations being required annually, funding for such construction projects can be phased over decades as part of a state's larger capital budget/bond programs. Recent research from the National Science Foundation (NSF) documents the results of the increased importance placed in university research building programs.

During fiscal years 2001-03, research-performing colleges and universities increased their research space by 11 percent, a substantially higher rate than any previous two-year period since 1988, a new NSF InfoBrief states.

While local workforce boards are using substantial funds for worker training under the Workforce Investment Act (WIA), little is known on a national level about the outcomes of those trained, says a new report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO).

In 1998, Congress passed the WIA to create a system connecting employment, education and training services to better match job seekers to labor market needs, according to the report. Since its creation, however, questions have been raised regarding how those funds are being used and how much is being spent on training. Also, according to the report, concern remains regarding the lack of accurate information on the extent to which WIA participants are enrolled in activities. The GAO report seeks to answer the following:

A partnership between U.S. universities, research centers, private sector corporations, and Indian institutions recently was formed to improve engineering education in India and offer U.S. faculty the opportunity to collaborate with Indian researchers.

Universities UC Berkeley, UC San Diego, Carnegie Mellon University, Cornell University, the State University of New York at Buffalo, and Case Western Reserve University are joining with Indian institutions led by AMRITA University, along with the government of India and the country's Department of Science and Technology. Private sector partners QUALCOMM Inc., Microsoft Corporation, and Cadence Systems, Inc. are funding the program.

Partisan politics take a back seat when the nation's governors talk about the need for stronger national innovation policies. Ample proof of this is offered policy position statements approved at the two most recent meetings of the Western Governors' Association and the National Governors Association.

Both resolutions call for increased federal support of basic research. The Western Governors' Association, representing 18 states, American Samoa, Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands, also called for Congress to make the federal R&D tax credit permanent, to provide more funding for science and math education, and to help level international tax policies to encourage domestic investment.

The yearly dollar amount of research and experimentation (R&E) tax credit claims grew twice as fast as company and other nonfederally funded R&D expenditures between 1990 and 2001, a new National Science Foundation (NSF) InfoBrief reports. In contrast, direct federal funding for industrial R&D declined through much of the 1990s, both in absolute terms and relative to industry-funded R&D.

The InfoBrief considers R&E tax credit data from the U.S. Internal Revenue Service and R&D funding data from NSF's annual Survey of Industrial R&D. For 2001, the latest year for which data are available, U.S. corporate claims for the R&E tax credit totaled approximately $6.4 billion ($6.2 billion in 2000 constant or inflation-adjusted dollars), compared with a high of $7.1 billion in 2000.

As most practitioners know, measuring progress for tech-based economic development efforts can be difficult given the long lead time necessary for most research investments to yield results. Consequently, many programs rely on interim measures to evaluate a policy or program's impact. Still others use input measures such as amount of money distributed through a particular program, the number of grants made, the number of companies involved, or the amount of money leveraged by the state's investment. Unfortunately, none of those measures provide much insight on a program's true impact.

A new assessment of the National Science Foundation's efforts to attract underrepresented population groups into science, technology and math (STEM) fields provides an example of the difficulty programs have assessing interim progress.

Do women shy away from competition? Do men compete too much? In a recent working paper published by the National Bureau of Economics Research (NBER), economists Muriel Niederle and Lise Vesterlund answer yes to both questions after measuring performance and preferences of men and women in a controlled environment.

Niederle and Vesterlund test individuals on their ability to add sums where payments benefit high-performing individuals who select a competitive "tournament" scheme rather than a per-piece payment. More than half of the women select the noncompetitive option, even when they would have likely garnered more earnings under the tournament. Conversely, twice as many men chose the tournament even when past performance indicated the likelihood of no earnings under this choice.

A community essentially has two options for strategies to diversify its economic base: traditional economic development or technology-based economic development (TBED). The traditional approach of recruiting or inducing companies to relocate to their community from elsewhere creates an atmosphere of competition, rivalry and one-upmanship among cities and regions as they bid to buy firms' location decisions. Often, it is also difficult for small and mid-sized communities to compete on these terms. The result, particularly with large manufacturing facilities, can be publicly financed incentive packages that may prove economically more expensive to a community than the benefits promised by the new development. Increasingly, economic development professionals are learning those promised jobs may never fully materialize.

Since passage of the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980, universities across the country have established transfer technology offices to assist in commercializing academic inventions. Efforts to transfer university inventions to the market continue to be a difficult proposition, with less than a third of disclosed inventions resulting in license. Start-ups garner only one in eight licenses.

Many community and economic development professionals believe the report released last Tuesday should have predated the President's 2006 Budget to consolidate or eliminate 18 federal programs used by most parts of the country to support growth and well-being (see the Feb. 14 issue of the Digest). Among those targeted in the move are the Community Development Block Grants (CDBG) and the entire Economic Development Administration (EDA) slate of grant programs. What was proposed in the Administration's budget request was a smaller program called Strengthening America's Communities Initiative, or SACI for short.

Coming off the heels of the state legislature's approval of a new Emerging Technologies Fund (see the June 13 issue of the Digest), Gov. Rick Perry announced last Saturday that Texas would provide a $50 million grant to establish the Texas Institute for Genomic Medicine (TIGM). The Emerging Tech Fund remains untouched, however, as the $50 million will be taken out of the original $295 million appropriated for the governor's discretionary Texas Enterprise Fund.

The nonprofit TIGM is a collaborative effort between the Texas A&M University System and Lexicon Genetics, a private technology firm located in Woodland, Texas, north of Houston. Lexicon will receive $35 million of the grant to create two copies of its library of 350,000 mouse stem cell lines for use by TIGM to identify new drugs for combating human diseases.