SSTI Digest

The Executive Office of the President released its first research and development memo at the end of August for fiscal year 2023. The memo is intended to provide instructions to agencies about the administration's priorities for R&D spending and activities, which should then be reflected in budget requests and agency activities. It highlights the research and development goals of the Biden administration in areas such as pandemic readiness, climate change mitigation, emerging technology, national security, public trust in STEM, and diversity and equity.

The memo emphasizes the need for pandemic readiness and prevention. It stresses that federal agencies should utilize R&D investments toward early warning systems, vaccine development and manufacturing, and diagnostic technologies — emphasizing the importance of being prepared for future pandemics and being able to monitor them in real-time, both domestically and internationally.

NSF announced five new multi-institution I-Corps Hubs to deliver entrepreneurship training to academic researchers and scale the National Innovation Network. Each hub is funded at $3 million per year for five years and comprises a regional alliance of at least eight universities. The hubs are intended to offer a more integrated approach than the previous I-Corps Nodes and I-Corps Sites, which were funded separately. The new model will provide increase funding and enable scaling I-Corps across the country.

The I-Corps program was established in 2011 and connects NSF-funded academic researchers across science and engineering with the technological, entrepreneurial, and business communities to help create a National Innovation Network. NSF plans to issue a new I-Corps Hubs solicitation in fall 2021 to continue to expand opportunities for entrepreneurship education and technology translation throughout the U.S. More information, including the lead universities and their regional partners, is available here. 

The U.S. Department of Commerce’s Minority Business Development Agency (MBDA) awarded $3.7 million total in federal funding across nine grant recipients to establish MBDA Advanced Manufacturing Centers, Export Centers, and a Federal Procurement Center. The investment will assist minority business enterprises (MBEs) in generating capital, investing in new technologies, winning federal contracts and expanding the minority business footprint within the economy. The MBDA Advanced Manufacturing Centers and Export Centers each will receive $400,000 a year for five years and the MBDA Federal Procurement Center will receive $500,000 in each of the five years.

The grant recipients include:

MBDA Advanced Manufacturing Centers

Despite the pandemic and economic downturn of 2020, the amount of money invested by angel investors increased more than 6 percent over 2019, according to the 2020 Halo Report, an annual report on angel investments primarily within the United States released collaboratively by the Angel Resource Institute and Pitchbook. The report provides financial metrics on seed and Series A angel investments with key insights into regional differences, while offering an analysis on the demographic trends among the CEOs of companies at these stages.

In 2020, $4.62 billion was invested by angels into seed and Series A companies. Seed and pre-seed amounted for $2.84 billion of the total transactions while Series A amounted to $1.02 billion — the remainder of transactions were in unclear stages that precede Series B. This was an increase from 2019, which saw $4.33 billion in total angel investments with $2.5 billion in seed companies.

In addition to the information we share through our in-person gatherings, one of the key elements of our conferences has always been the connections we make, both old and new. We always strive to bring you the best possible experience at our Annual Conference, and we know from your feedback that being able to meet in-person and network is something you value as highly as we do. As an organization with science at its core, we've been following where the science leads us throughout the pandemic. With the high level of contagion of the delta variant and the CDC's guidance that vaccinated people wear masks indoors in areas with significant and high spread, we've come to the conclusion that it is best for us to postpone our Annual Conference until spring of 2022. At that time, we hope conditions will change, including a significantly higher percentage of the population getting vaccinated, so that we will be able to present our Annual Conference the way we always have. We're working out the details on the new dates of the conference and hope to share that news with you very soon.

Prior to the COVID-19 outbreak and made more urgent by its financial impact on low-income households and households of color, the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco’s Fintech Team and the Aspen Institute’s Financial Security Program has been exploring how the greater racial equity goals in financial systems intersects with the growing field of digital financial technology, or fintech. The Fed’s August issue of Community Development Innovation Review examines gaps in the financial system and consider ways to address them, looking at the ways elements of fintech either promote or hinder equity and inclusion. It comes at a time when the growing field of fintech is garnering even more attention from investors and established financial institutions.

A new Congressional Research Service (CRS) primer provides an overview of the bioeconomy and offers some potential federal policy considerations for strengthening the competitiveness of the U.S. in the global bioeconomy. Although it does not cover individual sectors that contribute to the bioeconomy, it gives a broad, macro-level perspective that may aid in a general understanding of that segment of the economy. The report offers an overview of past federal and legislative bioeconomy initiatives, but notes that it is not a comprehensive compilation of those activities.

New America has announced a second round of funding for their New Models for Career Preparation program, a project that aims to discover scalable principles that go into creating high-quality, non-degree programs at community colleges. They are seeking six community colleges that are leaders in workforce development to understand the institutional factors that help a community college offer high-quality, non-degree workforce programs that lead to quality jobs. Each will receive $50,000 to support their workforce needs while joining New America’s research and storytelling effort to help community colleges elevate the visibility and maximize the impact of their workforce programs.

The Pennsylvania Department of Community and Economic Development (DCED) in partnership with a student team at Carnegie Mellon University has developed a new Innovation Economy Dashboard that is intended to help inform policymaking decisions based on reliable data. The dashboard and an accompanying report on Pennsylvania’s Innovation Economy originated from Gov. Tom Wolf’s January 2020 proposal to spur innovation across the state, focusing on the entrepreneurial ecosystem and growing tech sectors.

Understanding how federal funding for the science and engineering (S&E) activities of the nation’s institutions of higher education (IHEs) is distributed locally within states can help innovation leaders develop programs and policies tailored more carefully to the varying conditions of regional innovation economies. This edition of Useful Stats builds on our previous state-level analyses of federal S&E support to IHEs by type of S&E activity and by funding agency, using 2019 data on individual institutions from the National Science Foundation’s Survey of Federal Science and Engineering Support to Universities, Colleges, and Nonprofit Institutions, providing a detailed city-level view of the distribution of federal S&E funding to IHEs within states.

A new Congressional Research Service (CRS) primer provides an overview of the bioeconomy and offers some potential federal policy considerations for strengthening the competitiveness of the U.S. in the global bioeconomy. Although it does not cover individual sectors that contribute to the bioeconomy, it gives a broad, macro-level perspective that may aid in a general understanding of that segment of the economy. The report offers an overview of past federal and legislative bioeconomy initiatives, but notes that it is not a comprehensive compilation of those activities.

The U.S. Economic Development Administration (EDA) has launched the FY 2021 $2 million STEM Talent Challenge to support programs to train science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) talent and fuel regional innovation economies across the nation. The challenge will provide funding for work-and-learn programs to increase America’s workforce in emerging and transformative sectors such as space commerce, aeronautics, digital manufacturing, biotechnology, advanced manufacturing and cybersecurity. 

Competitive applications will demonstrate how the program will develop or expand regional STEM workforce capacity to support entrepreneurial ventures, industries of the future, and other innovation-driven businesses.