SSTI Digest

More than half since recession "officially" ended There is little comforting news in a new statistical report for workers in the U.S. information and communication technologies (ICT) sector. Researchers from the University of Illinois-Chicago found the sector lost 403,300 jobs between March 2001 and April 2004.

A staggering 200,000 of the high-wage jobs were lost since the recession was officially declared over in November 2001, making the notion of a jobless recovery a significant understatement for the sector.

The resilience of the regional ICT sectors and the overall economies of the seven profiled metropolitan areas are being tested with the incredible losses suffered since the bubble burst in March 2001. The following list presents the percentage change in total ICT employment between March 2001 and April 2004 for the seven primary metropolitan statistical areas (PMSA):

While it appears that federal programs in the U.S. have succeeded in efforts to increase enrollment in higher education, the nation has fallen behind in retaining college graduates, according to a new report from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

Education at a Glance 2004 is a comprehensive report on education systems within the organization’s 30 member countries. Statistics in the report provide a basis for policy debate and decisions, according to OECD, and this year’s report highlights factors affecting the future supply of qualified people and the relationship between educational attainment, employment and earnings.

U.S. Secretary of Education Rod Paige said the report confirms that in every country, education and earnings are strongly linked and the benefits are not limited to individuals, but include increased workforce productivity and technological progress.

During the recent past, heavy loss of manufacturing jobs has created considerable economic upheaval in several states, particularly the industrial heartland of the country where manufacturing represents more of a state's private payrolls than the national average. Michigan, alone, lost 18 percent of its manufacturing-related jobs from 2000 to 2003, a staggering 163,000 mostly high-wage jobs. Still, the manufacturing sector comprises 17 percent of the total jobs in the Great Lakes state.

Stemming the loss of manufacturing operations across the U.S. through improved technological competitiveness and leaner production processes is a goal of many state and federal tax credits, policies and programs, such as the successful NIST Manufacturing Extension Partnership and its network of 400 state and regional affiliate centers.

Seekers for evidence of the increasingly global nature of competition on the research and innovation levels need look no further than some recent announcements stemming from Malaysia. As part of its 2005 budget plan, the Malaysian government aims to create a new matching grant program for private R&D in January, triple financial support for its Small and Medium-sized Industry Fund, encourage government-linked companies to investment up to 10 percent of profits into research efforts over the next five years, and increase government support for research through the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovations.

The economic development component of the Ninth Malaysian Plan, introduced by Prime Minister Dato’ Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi on Sept. 10, outlines several significant investments and initiatives. Highlights include:

The role community colleges play in building tech economies has grown substantially during the past decade beyond important, yet traditional, worker training programs. A new compendium from the National Association for Community College Entrepreneurship (NACCE) provides several examples of efforts by its 14-member community colleges and technical schools to foster entrepreneurship. Highlighted programs include:

The presentations from last week's conference, Knowledge Clusters and Entrepreneurship in Regional Economic Development, now available online, provide a good introduction to many of the topics and issues to be discussed at SSTI's annual conference, Building Tech-based Economies: Preparing for Tomorrow's Challenges, in Philadelphia, Oct. 13-15.

Organized by the Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota, the Clusters conference included case studies on U.S. and Irish clusters and entrepreneurship as well as:

Location-based tax incentives to encourage the clustering of technology companies in distressed areas or around research universities has grown in popularity since Michigan's smart zones were created several years ago.

Last week, New Jersey Gov. James McGreevey signed an Executive Order creating three Innovation Zones – industry clusters centered around and including the campuses of the New Jersey Institute of Technology, Rutgers University, and the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey.

The concept underlying the Innovation Zones is to create an innovation triangle – a partnership among tech-based companies, the state’s research universities, and state government. Mutual proximity is expected to lead to partnerships between businesses and universities to better meet research and development needs.

Securing the multi-year funding needed to properly ramp up technology-based economic development (TBED) initiatives can be difficult in states with annual budget cycles and tight revenue streams. Fortunately, there is one federal agency that provides financial assistance increasingly toward local and regional projects matching the interests of the nation's TBED community.

Unfortunately, annual appropriations for the U.S. Economic Development Administration (EDA) have dropped by nearly 20 percent over the past four years, making competition for the federal matching grants that much more fierce as the nation's economy heightened the need to encourage innovation-based growth.

Two separate EDA grants awarded last week in North Dakota, totalling $1.2 million, provide examples of how states and local communities can direct the funding toward TBED programs.

As part of a new initiative to address pressing ethical, legal and social questions raised by recent advances in genetic and genomic research, the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) has awarded approximately $20 million in grants to fund interdisciplinary centers within universities around the country over the next five years. NHGRI is one of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

According to NIH, each of the centers will assemble a team of experts in several disciplines such as bioethics, law, behavioral and social sciences, clinical research, theology, public policy and genetic and genomic research to develop innovative research approaches focused on specific sets of issues related to genomic research. The centers’ output, according to NIH, will be critical in formulating and implementing effective and equitable health and social polices related to genomic research.

The need for programs to encourage science, math and technology education (SMET) among most minority groups becomes evident when one consider the nation’s need for a high skilled workforce, the growing portion of the total population divided among minority groups, and the low percentage most minorities represent of science and engineering professionals. The Louis Stokes Alliances for Minority Participation (LSAMP) program in the National Science Foundation (NSF) is one of three federal programs attempting to address the issue.

Different in its approach from the NASA and NIH efforts, the NSF program strives to increase the number of minority students completing a baccalaureate degree in a SMET-related field and enrolling in related graduate program by financially supporting partnerships among academic institutions, industry, government agencies, laboratories and professional organizations. Twenty-eight LSAMPs have been funded in 24 states since the program was created in 1991.

Measured over a three-year period, minority women-owned businesses had similar survival rates and employment growth compared to all women-owned firms, according to a recent series of federal reports. However, when measured against other minority women-owned firms, African American women-owned businesses showed greater job loss and lower survival rates.

The National Women’s Business Council (NWBC) released last month five Issues in Brief, providing a state-by-state analysis of trends in survival rates and employment growth among minority women. The briefs are separate reports focusing on African American, Asian American, Latina, and Native American women, along with a minority summary report that provides detailed tables by both state and industry. The reports accompany an earlier brief that examined 923,000 women-owned firms between 1997 and 2000.

Real median household income remained unchanged between 2002 and 2003 at $43,318, according to a report released last week by the U.S. Census Bureau. The report, Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2003, includes data collected from the 2004 Annual Social and Economic Supplement to the Current Population Survey.

In conjunction with the report, the 2003 American Community Survey (ACS) also was released. The ACS is the largest household survey in the U.S., having considered 800,000 housing units per year during its 2000-2004 test phase. Similar to the decennial census long form it is designed to replace, the ACS provides information on money income, poverty and other social and economic indicators. ACS data for 2003 are shown for 116 metropolitan areas, 233 counties and 68 cities, all with populations of 250,000 or more.