Useful Stats

The SBIR/STTR program, which dubs itself as “America’s Seed Fund,” is one of the broadest forms of early-stage capital available to small technology companies. During the five-year period from 2013 to 2017, the 11 federal agencies participating in the SBIR/STTR program distributed 25,524 awards. Using charts, maps, and a downloadable spreadsheet, this Digest article looks at trends in SBIR/STTR awards by state over the period, including the companies with the most awards and states where SBIR/STTR awards outnumber VC deals. A future article will look at awards by metropolitan area.

Federal agencies with extramural R&D budgets exceeding $100 million are required to allocate 3.2 percent of their R&D budgets to the SBIR/STTR program. The U.S. Small Business Administration, which oversees the SBIR/STTR program, releases data on individual awards across agencies. SSTI has collected this data and compiled it by state. The interactive graphic below displays the data by award type (SBIR/STTR), phase, agency, and year.  

Earlier this month, the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) published its 2017 estimates on state-level real gross domestic product (GDP). Per-capita gross product is a useful metric because it can show a state’s relative performance against its peers and over time. SSTI has prepared a spreadsheet showing 10 years of real per capita gross product by state, as well as an interactive map showing changes over the 1-year, 5-year, and 10-year periods. As more data becomes available, a future Digest issue will cover this topic at the metropolitan level. 

At nearly $160,000 per person, real per capita gross product was highest, by far, in Washington D.C. in 2017. Coastal states like Massachusetts ($66,500 per person), New York ($65,220), Delaware ($63,955), and Connecticut ($62,633), as well as energy-intensive states like North Dakota ($64,911), Alaska ($63,610), and Wyoming ($61,091), ranked highly for real per capita gross product in 2017.

Across the nation, R&D at colleges and universities plays an important role in generating promising inventions, training our STEM talent pipeline, and supporting regional economic development. An SSTI analysis of National Science Foundation data finds that higher-education R&D (HERD) is a multi-billion dollar industry that directly employs nearly one million personnel on projects and grants in the United States. However, the locations of R&D projects and personnel differ greatly by state and region.

Across the country, companies reported nearly $300 billion in self-funded and self-performed domestic R&D in 2015, according to recent data from the National Science Foundation’s Business R&D and Innovation Survey (BRDIS), with nearly one-third of this total ($95.0 billion) coming from California. Businesses in Wyoming, Washington D.C., and Utah reported the greatest increase in self-funded and self-performed R&D from 2010 to 2015.

As explored in last week’s Digest, the presence of Eds and Meds institutions can positively influence the levels of human capital in a region, but the need to keep costs low can hinder their overall growth. SSTI’s analysis subsequently found that employment in Eds and Meds industries increased in every state from 2005 to 2015. This article looks at Eds and Meds employment for the largest metropolitan areas in the United States. Mid-sized regions in the Northeast like Rochester, New York (4.4 percentage points), New Haven, Connecticut (2.9 percentage points), and Harrisburg, Pennsylvania (2.3 percentage points) experienced the largest growth in per-capita employment in Eds and Meds industries between 2010 and 2015.

For decades, state and local economies have leaned heavily on their anchor institutions during times of economic uncertainty and transition. An analysis finds that total employment in “Eds and Meds” industries increased in every state from 2005 to 2015. This article breaks down the growth and geography of Eds and Meds employment at the state level, while next week’s issue of the Digest will explore this data by metropolitan area.

Note: this article has been updated.

The recent tax law created a new vehicle, “Opportunity Zones” (Section 13823), to spur investment in companies and projects in distressed communities. As covered in detail during a recent SSTI members-only webinar, the tax incentive provides investors who reinvest capital gains into these zones with the ability to defer taxes on those gains and, if the Opportunity Zone investment is held at least 10 years, to waive taxes on any new capital gains. Zones must be declared this spring by each state’s governor, and only 25 percent of a state’s high poverty or low income census tracts may be included.

Last week, SSTI looked at recently released data on venture capital dollars and deals by state, finding that total investment has skyrocketed but remains heavily concentrated in a few markets. This week we examine this data through two additional lenses: VC investment intensity and VC investment per technology startup.

Late last year, the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) released data on tech-startups by state, which they define as firms 10 years old and younger in 10 R&D intensive industries. These include six manufacturing industries like medical devices and semiconductor machinery, and four service industries like software publishing and scientific R&D.

Young R&D-intensive technology startups are the types of companies that attract venture capital; there is a very high correlation (0.86) between the quantity of tech-startups in a state and its venture capital activity.

Over the five-year period from 2012 to 2017, as total venture capital investments more than doubled, growing from $41.2 billion to $84.0 billion, the number of deals increased by just 2.7 percent according to new data from the NVCA-Pitchbook Venture Capital Monitor. In 2017, more than half of all venture capital deals and three-quarters of all venture capital dollars went to companies in California, New York, and Massachusetts in 2017. However, the share of deals going to these three states decreased slightly from 2007 to 2017 (from 56.1 to 52.4 percent), while the share of dollars increased from 62.3 percent to 75.7 percent.

Based on the NVCA-Pitchbook Venture Capital Monitor data, SSTI has prepared information on VC investment by state and changes over time. That data, along with state-by-state totals for 2007-2017 are available in Excel format below.

The growth and intensity of higher education R&D (HERD) expenditures varies considerably across metropolitan areas, a recent SSTI analysis of National Science Foundation data finds. New York ($4.3 billion), Boston ($3.2 billion), and Baltimore ($2.9 billion) had the highest overall levels of HERD expenditures in 2016. In that same year, Ithaca, New York (19.1 percent), State College, Pennsylvania (9.5 percent), and College Station, Texas (9.4 percent) had the highest levels of HERD intensity – measured as the share of HERD expenditures to gross metropolitan product. While overall HERD expenditures increased by nearly $7.5 billion nationwide from 2011 to 2016, more than half of this total (50.6 percent) went to the 10 metro areas with the most HERD expenditures in 2016.

Last week, The Digest covered newly released data from the National Science Foundation’s National Center for Science Education Statistics, which found that for the first time in five years, federal funding for higher education research and development increased in both current and constant dollars. For the country as a whole, higher education R&D expenditures increased by roughly 10 percent from FY 2011 to FY 2016, while gross domestic product increased by nearly twice as much. This article examines state-by-state trends in R&D activity at colleges at universities.

Overall, there were few changes among the top state performers of R&D at institutions of higher education (HERD), and those changes were relatively small. In a comparison of 2011 and 2016 rankings, 35 states moved just one spot or zero spots. Only one state, Connecticut, moved more than three spots in the rankings.

An aging, more diverse workforce is what the Bureau of Labor Statistics foresees in the coming decade, with a declining participation rate, which may in turn restrict economic growth. The new projections released this week echo the downward trend in the rate of labor force participation since the peak of 67.3 percent in early 2000. While recent trends show an increasing level of participation among the 55+ crowd, there has been a decreasing level of participation among 16 to 24-year-olds as school enrollment has increased, as well as a continuing decline among the prime working-age cohort of 25 to 54-year-olds.

An SSTI analysis of the labor force participation rate of the prime age workers for each state revealed a great amount of variation among the states. The map below shows the participation rate for this cohort averaged out over 2014-2016 to account for yearly fluctuations.