SSTI Digest

Lu Cordova is the new President of the Colorado Technology Incubator.

The Center for Environmental Enterprise (CEE) in South Portland, Maine announced the hiring of a new executive director. John Ferland assumed leadership of CEE in late April.

Due to length considerations, this week's Funding Opportunities Supplement to the SSTI Weekly Digest was sent separately. During the past two weeks, the federal register has announced 15 federally owned inventions that available for licensing from the Army, Navy, National Institutes of Health and the Department of Energy. The full text of the announcements, including descriptions of the inventions in many cases, can be found at: http://www.ssti.org/Digest/Tables/060101t.htm

A Special Issue of the SSTI Weekly Digest focusing on the SBIR and STTR programs will be released early next week. The issue will include comments on the SBIR Policy Directive from SSTI and three outside exports and other timely items related to FAST, ROP, and several individual agency programs.

The Michigan Economic Development Corporation (MEDC), in partnership with several public and private organizations, has outlined a plan to address telecommunications infrastructure needs across the state. LinkMichigan, released last week, addresses several telecommunications infrastructure issues or concerns that were increasingly facing the public and private sector, including:

With so much attention given to increasing private seed and venture capital activity as a means of growing tech-based economies, one might expect that encouraging and attracting community development venture capital (CDVC) – that is, equity investments and entrepreneurial assistance to meet both profit targets and community development goals – would be a common element of a state or local community’s portfolio of economic development tools. Increasingly it is, according to the first in-depth research on the state of the CDVC industry, released recently by the Community Development Venture Capital Alliance (CDVCA). In fact, the study, prepared by Harvard Ph.D candidate Julia Sass Rubin, found more than 50 CDVC providers actively investing or in formation at the beginning of 2000 – up from a mere handful only five years ago. The combined capitalization of these providers at the end of 1999 was $300 million.

San Jose, Austin, and San Francisco received top honors in the 3rd Annual Forbes-Milken Institute Best Places Ranking. San Jose and San Francisco raced to the top of the list from 29th and 42th place respectively in 1999. Completing the top ten metro areas in 2000 are: Boulder, CO; Dallas, TX; Santa Rosa, CA; Boise City, ID; San Diego, CA; Phoenix-Mesa, AZ; and Oakland, CA. The top metro area east of the Mississippi River, Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill, NC, came in 13th. The Forbes-Milken Institute project ranked the top 200 large metro areas based on a weighted scoring of the eight data categories listed below.

Colorado The Governor’s Office of Innovation and Technology and the state’s Science and Technology Commission have teamed up to create the Colorado Technology Alliance to provide tech business recruitment information and assistance. According to a recent Pueblo Chieftain article, the Alliance will prepare a clearinghouse website and a 120-page resource magazine. Local and regional information for the website will be administered and maintained by local tech-based economic development officials. Covington, Kentucky

With an overall positive review, the Office of the Inspector General within the National Science Foundation (NSF) has made several recommendations for improving the performance of NSF's Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR). EPSCoR plays an important and strategic role in many states’ efforts to build a stronger research enterprise and tech-based economy. In FY 2000, the NSF EPSCoR program distributed $51.7 million to 19 states and Puerto Rico. The FY 2001 budget is $74.8 million. Created in 1978, the NSF EPSCoR program has served as a model for other agencies’ efforts to increase the research culture of states that have historically received a small share of federal research dollars.

The Small Business Administration has extended the deadline for states to submit proposals in response to program announcement no. FAST-01-R-001 for the Federal and State Technology Partnership (FAST). FAST will support state efforts to foster economic development among small high technology businesses through federally funded innovation and research and development programs. According to the website for the SBA Office of Science & Technology, the deadline for proposals has been extended to June 28, 2001. See http://www.sba.gov/sbir/fastextension.html

Ever wonder how many SSTI Weekly Digest articles have covered tax credits? (Answer is 47) strategic plans? (35), biotechnology? (80), workforce issues?(92), indicators? (14), telecommunications? (77), math & science? (50), capital, both seed and venture? (150) To help make your research efforts easier, SSTI has restored the search feature for our website: http://ssti.org.master.com  Feedback from users would be appreciated. Return to the top of this page

With an eye toward helping to make Kansas City a leading center for biomedical research, James Stower Jr., founder of American Century mutual funds, and his wife are donating $1.114 billion to the Stowers Institute of Medical Research. The donation is considered one of the five largest philanthropic gifts in history. The Institute, opened last November after completion of the $200 million campus, is engaged in basic research toward long-term solutions for gene-based diseases such as cancer and diabetes. Already employing four molecular biologists recruited from California, Utah, Texas and London, England, and their staff, the Stowers Institute plans to have more than 50 independent research programs when fully operational.

Calling for the program to more than triple in size by 2007, Senator John F Kerry (D-Massachusetts) and several other Senators introduced legislation last week to reauthorize and expand the Small Business Technology Transfer Program (STTR). STTR currently requires five federal agencies -- the National Science Foundation, NASA, and the departments of Defense, Health & Human Services, and Energy -- to award 0.15 percent of their extramural R&D budgets to research partnerships between small businesses and research institutions. If passed, the new bill would gradually increase the set-aside requirement to 0.5 percent by fiscal year 2007. S. 856 also calls for reauthorizing STTR through fiscal year 2010 and increasing the size of Phase II awards from $500,000 to $750,000, the same level as awards in the much larger Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program. After its introduction, S. 856 was referred to the Senate Small Business Committee for consideration.