SSTI Digest

President Joe Biden nominated Laurie Locascio, Ph.D., to lead the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) within the U.S. Department of Commerce and serve as Undersecretary for Standards and Technology. Locascio is currently the vice president for research at the University of Maryland, College Park and the University of Maryland, Baltimore, where she oversees the research and innovation enterprise of the two campuses. Prior to her work there, Locascio had a long career as a researcher, innovator and scientific leader at NIST, where she most recently served as the acting principal deputy director and associate director for laboratory programs. She received a B.Sc. in chemistry from James Madison University, a M.Sc. in bioengineering from the University of Utah, and a Ph.D. in toxicology from the University of Maryland, Baltimore. As a biomedical researcher, she has published more than 100 scientific papers and 11 patents over the course of her career.

Whether or not your state embraced strict measures in an attempt to reduce virus spread, the current pandemic has created the need for reflection and revision of how each of us go about our lives. The same opportunity has arisen for the public and private sectors to rethink how they engage in many core functions.  Civic leaders in Arkansas did just that and today released a strategic plan with recommendations to guide economic development in the new era.  Its central themes, including strong focus on innovation, entrepreneurship, and talent, could have broader applicability to other states as we move forward. Innovation and R&D figure prominently in the state’s new direction: “To create meaningful change in the Arkansas economy, the state must embrace innovation as a critical driver of economic prosperity. This will require a cultural shift incorporating robust and long-term investments in the innovation ecosystem … .” For conventional economic development practices, this means revisiting the state’s “incentives and metrics to align them with knowledge-based economic development priorities and support for innovation.”  The plan also calls for…

When planning and evaluating programs and policies in local and regional innovation economies, a key measure is the amount of private business research and development (R&D) activity taking place, typically found in the Business Enterprise Research & Development Survey (BERD). The Census Bureau, in cooperation with the National Science Foundation’s National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics (NCSES), is seeking public comment on planned updates to the BERD survey. BERD is instrumental in the federal government’s duties to calculate national gross domestic product, setting policy at the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy, and also informs researchers from academia, industry, and the nonprofit sector. As required by law, the Census Bureau has released a Request for Information (RFI) seeking information from the public on the proposed changes and structure to BERD for the 2021-2023 cycle. Specifically, the Census Bureau will use information from the RFI to: Evaluate whether the proposed information collection is necessary, including whether the information will have practical utility; Evaluate the accuracy of the time estimate…

Recession can drive increases in entrepreneurship as laid off workers look for other opportunities and start their own businesses. Increases in business startup activity throughout the 2020 recession were greater than any time in the 15 years prior. This edition of Useful Stats examines data from the Census Bureau’s Business Formation Statistics (BFS) series covering business initiation activity as indicated by applications for an Employer Identification Number (EIN). Specifically, this analysis examines high-propensity business applications (HBA*) per 1,000 residents per state — business applications that are associated with a high rate of business formation — for the 15-year period from 2006 to 2020. Nationally in 2020, there were 4.6 HBA per 1,000 residents. As seen in the interactive image below, the states with the greatest number of HBA per 1,000 state residents in 2020 were Wyoming (12.2); Delaware (10.7); Florida (8.6); Georgia (7.6); and the District of Columbia (5.9). The states with the fewest number of high-propensity business applications per 1,000 state residents in 2020 were New Mexico (2.7); Kentucky (2.6); New Hampshire (2.6); Iowa (2.5); and West…

Forthcoming research suggests venture development organizations, that is, those publicly-supported nonprofits that combine risk financing with expert technical assistance to grow local innovation-based startups, should give careful consideration to the exit histories of the venture capitalists they partner with to move the VDO’s portfolio firms through seed and series A investment rounds. Who those VCs know and have worked with to achieve successful exits previously through acquisitions or IPOs, in many cases, may be more important than the VC firms’ zip codes or assets under management. The path to a successful exit for each high-growth startup will vary; for example, exiting from the startup phase may take many forms, including staying an independent private company, becoming a publicly traded business through an IPO, or being acquired by a larger firm. The last two paths in that list are the most common for equity-financed innovation startups, with acquisitions being the much more prevalent of the two.  A new working paper by Maryann Feldman, et al. would indicate part of the VDO’s due diligence process when seeking VC investment partners for first and…

Nearly 1 in 6 adults carrying outstanding student loan debt (1 in 3 among 18 to 29 year olds), with both the number of borrowers and the debt amount increasing in recent decades. Meanwhile, the share of new entrepreneurs aged 20 to 34 declined from 34 percent to 27 between 1996 and 2019, and a new issue brief from the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation notes that among individuals who start businesses, higher levels of student loan debt are negatively related to business income and employment. Noting that the debt can directly affect an individual’s overall personal financial resources, and indirectly affect ability to start a business, the brief extends some considerations for decision makers who seek to respond to those challenges.

The federal government has not developed strategic economic intelligence to understand the competitive position of its traded sectors, and the time is now for a more advanced technology strategy and that will require a better data collection system. That is one of the key takeaways of a recent report from the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF). The report identifies three key areas with major statistical gaps and calls on Congress to fund modernization and expansion of federal statistical agency IT systems. In the introduction to the report, Robert Atkinson, ITIF president, notes, “If the U.S. government is going to develop more effective policies to spur competitiveness, growth, and opportunity, it will need to support better data collection.” Atkinson cites years of budget cuts to federal economic data agencies and a disregard of the need for sectoral and firm-level economic data to inform an industrial strategy as part of the challenge facing the country’s national statistical system. A better data system will also be necessary to evaluate the effectiveness of new technology and industry policies and programs, the report states. …

The House Committee on Appropriations advanced its first FY 2022 funding bills this week. Included in the financial services bill was $10 million for each of the U.S. Small Business Administration’s three main innovation programs: Regional Innovation Clusters, Federal and State Technology Partnership (FAST), and Growth Accelerators Fund Competition. The bill also includes language supporting a new White House Office of Manufacturing and Industrial Innovation to coordinate cross-agency policy and programs. Among SSTI’s Innovation Advocacy Council’s top legislative priorities are increased funding for the Regional Innovation Clusters and FAST programs, and the House’s proposed funding levels would be increases of $4 million and $6 million, respectively, above FY 2021. The amounts also match the White House’s budget proposal from earlier this year. The bill’s language supporting the new White House office may be insufficient to allow the appropriations to be used without further authorizing legislation. The Office of Manufacturing and Industrial Innovation authority is included in the Senate’s U.S. Innovation and Competition Act with a $10 million annual…

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has announced over $30 million in federal funding, matched by over $35 million in private sector funds, for 68 projects that will accelerate the commercialization of promising energy technologies. The awards are expected to help transfer solutions from the National Labs to the marketplace and work toward the president’s goal of net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. The awards are being facilitated by the DOE Office of Technology Transitions (OTT) Technology Commercialization Fund (TCF). To receive a TCF award, National Lab teams must receive a commitment from private sector partners to match at least 50 percent of the anticipated federal funding. This year’s selected TCF projects come from 12 DOE National Labs, supported by partners in 25 states and four countries, including the following SSTI members: Argonne National Laboratory—$4,150,000 in federal funds, cost-shared by partners in Wisconsin, California, Pennsylvania, Texas, Virginia, Kentucky, Illinois, and Indiana. Projects include processing materials for energy storage, highly-efficient processes to convert carbon dioxide to chemicals, advanced materials…

The U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) is soliciting nominations of qualified former and current small business owners, community leaders, officials from small business trade associations, and academic institutions to serve on the Council of Underserved Communities (CUC). The CUC is being restored to help support the SBA’s prioritization of equity across its programs and initiatives. SBA seeks candidates representing both urban and underserved communities. The CUC was initially established in 2010 to focus on communities and populations that have traditionally faced barriers in accessing credit, capital other resources necessary to start and grow businesses. The CUC's mission is to collectively provide the SBA with input on how to improve and strengthen equity among women -, veteran-, and minority-owned businesses and/or businesses from low-to-moderate income or rural communities. Nominations are being accepted on a rolling basis until July 20, 2021. More information on the nomination process is available through the SBA and the Federal Register.

Understanding enrollment trends at the nation’s institutions of higher education — an important indicator of the knowledge capital and skilled workforce available to local innovation economies — is paramount in developing appropriate strategies to bolster local and regional innovation and entrepreneurship. While many institutional reports cover only one or a few years’ worth of enrollment data, evaluating long-run trends can help policymakers and program designers identify issues that might otherwise be hidden, enabling the development of more effective policies and programs. This edition of Useful Stats builds on last week’s analysis of data for spring term enrollment at degree-granting institutions of higher education from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center (NSCRC). SSTI compiled data from several NSCRC reports to explore the 10-year trends in spring term enrollment per 1,000 residents by state from 2012 to 2021. The interactive graphic below shows the annual levels in total higher education spring term enrollment per 1,000 residents by state from 2012 to 2021. The interactive map will continuously loop through the years until the manual…

Helping to meet the challenge of fighting a global pandemic while growing high-quality jobs during an economic downturn, the life sciences industry showed its strength over the course of the past year. An update to the biennial Life Science Workforce Trends report from the Coalition of State Bioscience Institutes (CSBI) asserts that it is because of the industry’s skilled-talent base and sets out to assess the industry’s position and priorities in 2021, focusing on its demands for workforce and talent. Calling 2020 perhaps the “ultimate test of the industry’s resilience,” the report found that the life science industry represents a steady economic growth driver despite the pandemic’s challenges, noting that the industry continued to hire and grow its employment base by 1.4 percent in 2020 while the overall private sector saw a 5.1 percent decline. The life science industry also employs a more highly-skilled, STEM-intensive workforce compared to all industries, with 47 percent of the industry’s employment in high-skilled occupations compared to 27 percent for all other industries. High-skilled jobs are described in the report as those that typically require a…