SSTI Digest

Correction: In last week's People column, Tom Walker's new title was incorrect. Mr Walker is executive vice president and chief operating officer of the Oklahoma Technology Commercialization Center.

Richard Greene, director of the Arlington Technology Incubator and former mayor of Arlington Texas, has been appointed regional administrator of the U.S. EPA.

Doris Freedman has announced she is leaving the National Commission on Entrepreneurship effective March 31.

Colorado Governor Bill Owens has appointed Paul Ray as the state's first director of biosciences.

Peter Slate will preside as chief executive officer over the Arizona Technology Enterprises, the newly created limited liability company formed by spinning off Arizona State University's technology transfer office.

U.S. Senator Olympia J. Snowe (R-Maine), Chair of the Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship, has called on the Senate’s top appropriators to help reverse budget elimination of two key programs designed to strengthen the technological competitiveness of small businesses.

Snowe and a bipartisan group of 14 other senators released a letter calling on Appropriations Committee Chairman Ted Stevens (R-AK) and Ranking Member Robert Byrd (D-WV) to help identify new sources of funding “to alleviate the severe impact” of FY 2003 cuts in the Federal and State Technical Partnership (FAST) and Rural Outreach Programs (ROP) administered by the Small Business Administration. Both federal programs provide matching grants to state initiatives to help small businesses with technology development and commercialization.

A bi-partisan group of Senators have cosponsored the "New Homestead Economic Opportunity Act" to help renew the promise of the original Homestead Act to attract new residents and businesses to rural areas suffering from high out-migration. Introduced by Senator Bryon Dorgan (D-ND) and Chuck Hagel (R-NE) this week, the bill provides incentive tools including a $3 billion venture capital fund.

S. 602 calls for a federal injection of $200 million annually between 2004-2013 into the New Homestead Venture Capital Fund, after $100 million in investments have been made each year from private and nonfederal sources. The purpose of the fund would be to strengthen the economies of qualifying counties – those which have seen a net outmigration exceeding 10 percent over the past 20 years – by:

The United States Patent and Trademark Office has posted a preliminary list of the 10 U.S. universities receiving the most patents for inventions during calendar year 2002. The University of California tops the list for the ninth consecutive year. The table below also presents the school's 2001 ranking and total. 

Wrapping up its 2003 session earlier this month, the West Virginia State Legislature passed three bills designed to help build a technology-based economy.

Earlier this week, Colorado Chief Technology Officer John Hansen released a statewide plan to develop biotechnology and life sciences industry sectors in Colorado. Colorado's Place in the Sun: A Bioscience Future provides analysis, direction and recommended actions for three key sector areas — workforce development, business development, and research development.

After outlining the state's current strengths in biotech and life sciences, the plan identifies several key factors for success:

Conventional wisdom in the technology-based economic development community is that increased access to risk capital is critical for building competitive economies. Establishing a causal relationship between early-stage capital and employment growth external to the companies receiving the funds has been difficult, however.

A new working paper from the University of Vienna presents a model linking venture capital investment and job growth on the national level. Does Venture Capital Investment Spur Employment Growth?, written by Ansgar Belke, Rainer Fehn and Neil Foster, finds "a one unit increase in venture capital will increase employment growth by 1.8 percentage points."