Around the country, the current funding climate is forcing some technology groups to explore new relationships with each other, including consolidation. In other cases, it just makes good sense. For example, two of Maine's environmental and energy technology organizations are joining forces with the goal of advancing job growth, R&D and new product commercialization within their overlapping industries.
Encouraging innovation is an important part of the bottom line for many state and local technology-based economic development programs. The advantages or "spillover effects" of growing localized knowledge economies or concentrations of researchers and technology firms has been studied by academia for more than two decades. Much of the attention of that analysis and of subsequent public policy has been on the knowledge or process side of innovation.
Knowledge in the "knowledge economy" can be an extremely difficult entity to measure with any consistency. Innovation and technological change, both key drivers of economic growth, are elusive to grasp and even harder to measure reliably in geographic terms. Patent activity, however, has long been considered an important measure of innovation in the New Economy.
The National Science Foundation (NSF) has announced it intends to award approximately $30 million in FY 2005 funding under the Science and Technology Centers (STC): Integrative Partnerships program. NSF is encouraging proposals for high quality innovative research projects that undertake investigations across or within disciplines.
Rhode Island, like nearly every state in the country, is facing a projected budget deficit in FY 2004. To deal with a $175 million or 6.6 percent shortfall, 21 agencies are facing budget reductions in Governor Don Carcieri's first budget request to the Rhode Island General Assembly. However, demonstrating his commitment to "make strategic investments to promote job growth," Gov. Carcieri calls for increased support for several tech-based economic development initiatives.
Three-quarters of the nation's cities surveyed by the National League of Cities (NLC) report they are less able to meet their financial needs this year than they were a year ago. This is a sharp increase over the 55 percent of cities that said they were less able to meet financial needs in last year's survey by NLC, the oldest and largest national organization for American cities.
Washington State still ranks first nationally in the creation of new companies, according to the third annual Index of Innovation and Technology released by the Washington Technology Center (WTC), a state-funded organization that fosters technology employment growth. The Index also shows the number of patents earned by Washington inventors increased by 11 percent from 2000 to 2001.
Wisconsin Gov. Jim Doyle today unveiled the plan that will guide his Administration's legislative agenda for the next 12 months. Grow Wisconsin: The 2005 Agenda focuses on three areas: investing in business, investing in people, and fostering a competitive business climate.
Information, telecommunications and electricity provide the basic building blocks for all tech-based economic development - regardless of industry sector, research field or location. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the technology infrastructure for many of the state's emerging tech-firms has been dismantled. How do you restore efforts to build a tech-based economy when the fundamentals are destroyed overnight?
One of the latest big-ticket investments targeting stem cell research came from Ann Arbor last week as the University of Michigan committed $10.5 million of its internal resources to establish an interdisciplinary center for stem cell research. The announcement is one of dozens from around the country since California voters approved Proposition 71 in 2004, borrowing $3 billion over 10 years for stem cell research.
Between 1996 and 2004, an average 0.36 percent of the U.S. population created a new business each month, representing approximately 500,000 new businesses per month, according to the Kauffman Index of Entrepreneurial Activity.
Not too surprising. Put the premier professional development opportunity for the tech-based economic development community in a great city and you'll draw hundreds of participants from at least 45 states and several other countries. Offer conference attendees five-star accommodations at prices well below market and we've ended up with the largest room block yet for an SSTI annual conference.
Limited Seating Remaining in Three Preconference Sessions
In 2003, academic institutions across the U.S. reported having a total of $23.76 billion in R&D expenditures for research related to the life sciences, according to the National Science Foundation's Survey of Research and Development Expenditures at Universities and Colleges, FY 2003.
To better formulate technology and telecommunications policy, U.S.
In these tight state fiscal times, many government functions would view level funding with the previous year as very good news. Since tech-based economic development (TBED) programs are investments toward economic prosperity, conventional wisdom would hold that legislatures would shield these types of investments from deep cuts.
Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty recently unveiled a plan to help make Minnesota a leader in biosciences. Governor Pawlenty says the state's history, expertise and economic infrastructure make it better prepared than most other states to capitalize on the bioscience industry.
The Wisconsin Venture Network (WVN) in Milwaukee has folded into the Wisconsin Innovation Network (WIN) Foundation in Madison, and the combined WIN entity has become a subsidiary of the Wisconsin Technology Council.
A higher rate of entrepreneurial activity is strongly connected with faster growth of a local economy, the U.S. Census Bureau reports in Endogenous Growth and Entrepreneurial Activity in Cities. The recent working paper, prepared by the Bureau's Center for Economic Studies, examines the connection between knowledge spillover and economic growth in a regional economy.
Despite an economic slowdown, the Twin Cities is more competitive than it was a year ago, according to a study released by the Great North Alliance, a regional civic leadership organization. Conducted annually, the Great North Opportunity Forecast uses regional productivity and innovation to predict future competitiveness and opportunity.
Earlier this week U.S. Department of Commerce Secretary Don Evans announced the Digital Freedom Initiative (DFI) would be piloted in Senegal, a democratic secular nation in which 94 percent of the population is Muslim. DFI is designed to promote economic growth by transferring the benefits of information and communication technology (ICT) to entrepreneurs and small businesses in the developing world.
The National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education recently released The Rising Price of Higher Education, which documents the rising costs of public education in the U.S. Using the data found in the report, SSTI has constructed a 50-state table presenting a comparison of the cost of tuition and fees at 2- and 4-year public institutions in 2001-02 vs 2002-03.
The TBED community owes a huge debt of gratitude to Thomas Friedman for his 2005 book, The World is Flat. Friedman has helped elevate the issue of innovation, competitiveness, and the U.S. standing therein to the New York Times bestseller list, the Sunday talk shows, and scads of press coverage. Friedman has helped convince pundits and policymakers that the world is flat and the challenges to the U.S. are more serious than ever and are only increasing.
The early bird registration and hotel room block for Investing in a Brighter Future: Building Tech-based Economies, SSTI's Ninth Annual Conference, ends on Tuesday, September 20. To register for the conference, which is October 20 and 21, you can visit the conference website at http://www.ssti.org/conference05.htm and select the registration form.
Two years ago, Kannapolis, N.C., was reeling from the announcement that Pillowtex Corp, a major textile manufacturer, was filing for bankruptcy. Pillowtex's failure resulted in more than 4,500 jobs lost in just two North Carolina counties and thousands more in the Southeast U.S.