SSTI Digest

The State of Illinois recently announced a new World Wide Web site that provides Illinois firms with a means to quickly locate the technical and business assistance available in Illinois.

The Illinois Coalition reports that perhaps the most innovative feature of the site is its linkage to the new on-line version of the Thomas Regional Directory Company’s industrial buying guide.  The buying guide covers the North Central Tri-State Region, which includes Illinois and parts of Indiana, Michigan, and Wisconsin.  The directory can be used to conduct product and company information searches.

The site can be reached at: http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/illcoalition

The West Virginia Legislature recently approved a bill to create the West Virginia Science & Technology Policy Advisory Board.  The 11- member board will be appointed by the Governor and is expected to:

• prepare a strategic plan and make recommendations on programs that will further S&T development in the state
• cooperate with appropriate state agencies to retain and expand existing businesses
• formulate plans to establish S&T research centers at colleges and universities.

The Governor is expected to sign the legislation soon and appointments to the Board should be made by April 15th.

Earlier this month, President Clinton signed legislation designed to ease the transfer of federal technology by providing clarification on intellectual property rights and offering incentives to federal laboratories and their researchers. The National Technology Transfer and Advancement Act of 1995 (H.R. 2196) was sponsored by Rep. Morella (R-Md).

The Act helps define the intellectual property rights for companies participating in Cooperative Research and Development Agreements (CRADAs). According to Congresswoman Morella, current law provides little guidance to either the laboratory or the private sector partner on the rights the company should receive. Consequently, difficult negotiations have often resulted for some laboratories and partners each time a new CRADA is negotiated.

With the new Act, companies are ensured that they will have, at a minimum, an exclusive license in a prenegotiated field of use for the technology. The hope is that this will help speed negotiations. The company would then have the right to use the new invention in exchange for reasonable compensation to the laboratory.

While Congress and the White House continue to try to resolve differences on the FY96 federal budget, the Clinton Administration has released its detailed budget proposal for FY97.

The FY97 budget proposal calls for increasing spending on R&D to $72.3 billion in FY97, up from $71.5 billion in FY96.

Programs of particular interest to the states by federal agency are:

Department of Commerce

Technology Administration. The FY97 budget proposal calls for $835.5 million for Technology Administration, which is led by Mary Good. Of that amount, $826 million is for the National Institute of Standards and Technology (see below).

The remaining funding will support the Office of the Under Secretary for Technology and the Office of Technology Policy, including $1 million for the State-Federal Cooperative Science and Technology Initiative. This funding will be used in part to provide support for the federal interagency working group established at the request of the President’s Science Advisor as a result of the State-Federal Technology Partnership Task Force.

Clinton is expected to sign an emergency spending bill later today that will keep the government in operation through next Friday, March 22. Without the bill, parts of the government would have shut down for the third time this fiscal year.

Almost halfway through federal FY 1996, nine government departments are operating on temporary spending authority. Agencies that are affected include the Department of Commerce, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), NASA, and the National Science Foundation.

Meanwhile, the Administration is preparing to release more details on its proposed FY 1997 spending plan next Tuesday.  Watch for more details either in FYI messages or the Weekly Digest next week.

The General Accounting Office (GAO) released a report on the implementation of the Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Pilot Program. STTR is closely modeled after the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program with one notable exception: in the STTR Program, a small business must collaborate with a nonprofit research institution, such as a university. This collaboration is permitted but not required under SBIR.

The program began in FY1994 as a 3-year pilot and the authorizing legislation required that GAO report on the implementation of the program.

GAO reports that their discussions with agency officials “provided no evidence to suggest that STTR was competing for quality proposals with SBIR or reducing the quality of agency R&D in general.” Officials expressed differing views on the effect of the STTR Program on the agencies’ other R&D efforts, including the SBIR Program. The Army STTR program manager indicated that he believed the STTR Program had actually led to more collaboration in the Army’s SBIR Program, while SBA officials and the Department of Energy’s STTR program manager felt it was too early to draw any conclusions.