SSTI Digest

The Department of Commerce's Office of Technology Policy (OTP) recently released a policy paper that suggests the global environment affecting U.S. technology policy is changing rapidly, and policymakers are operating without current data or up-to-date conceptual frameworks.

The new report, The Global Context for U.S. Technology Policy, points out that "today's global competitive and technology landscape is profoundly different from the situation during much of the post-World War II period, when most of our current technology policies were developed."

The shifting balance between the U.S. and the rest of the world with respect to research and development activities in the last 40 years has been especially dramatic. In 1950, the U.S. performed 70 percent of the world's R&D activity. By 1994, the rest of the world was performing twice as much R&D as the U.S.

Price Waterhouse recently announced that venture capital investments hit an all-time record in the second quarter of 1997. Total investments exceeded $3.18 billion, a 13% increase over the $2.80 billion reported in the second quarter of 1996, which held the previous record. These findings were released in the Price Waterhouse Venture Capital Survey, a quarterly report of venture capital investments throughout the United States.

The following table represents the amount of venture capital dollars invested by region in the second quarter:

The Department of Energy (DOE) recently announced that, for the first time, its computing resources will be made available to academic researchers. The California Institute of Technology, Stanford University, the University of Chicago, the University of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign and the University of Utah were selected as DOE's Academic Strategic Alliances Program (ASAP) Centers of Excellence.

The program will team the universities with three national laboratories - Sandia, Livermore and Los Alamos - to develop advanced computer modeling and simulations to certify the safety and reliability of nuclear weapons in support of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, as well as broader national goals.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has announced that, as a first step in the transition from paper to electronic exchange of information, it is reformatting the current Notice of Grant Award (NGA) form.

Effective October 1, all NIH grant, cooperative agreement, and fellowship awards will be issued in a letter format. The new letter-format NGA will no longer provide

a cumulative record of all transactions affecting the particular budget period. For example, a supplemental award will only reflect the amount of the supplemental action, not the cumulative support for that budget period.

The Modernization Forum, a national association for the manufacturing extension community, seeks a project manager to join its team of professionals who work with the manufacturing extension community nationwide.

The project manager's responsibilities will include report research and writing, analysis of trends relevant to manufacturing extension, project management, direct interaction with member organizations across the country, and significant contributions to seminars and the annual national conference.

The complete job description can be found on SSTI's home page at http://www.ssti.org. For more information, contact Carol Lessure, Research Director for The Modernization Forum, at 313/271-2790 ext. 7, or by e-mail at clessure@modforum.org