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A recent brief shows the troubled relationship between student loan debt and entrepreneurship.

The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has launched the National Council for Expanding American Innovation (NCEAI), an initiative aimed at expanding innovation and entrepreneurship in America. The council consists of leaders in industry, government, and academia. The USPTO created the council to develop a comprehensive national strategy to build a more diverse and inclusive innovation economy.

The Lab-to-Market (L2M) subcommittee of the National Science and Technology Council’s Committee on the Science and Technology Enterprise is launching a $325,000 prize competition to highlight successful examples of innovation ecosystems, particularly existing resources that support underserved communities or remarkable responses to the pandemic environment. There are three categories for applicants with an informational webinar

Consideration of a state’s trends in the distribution of SBIR awards by federal agency may help program leaders and policy makers optimize the design and performance for state and regional support of innovation-based startups. For instance, knowing which federal agencies provide the dominant share of awards in a state can inform a program’s marketing and outreach efforts, and, more importantly for the startups being assisted, it can guide recruiting the right mix of mentors and knowledge assets to a program’s technical assistance capabilities.

As manufacturers become more reliant on automation, advanced control systems, and remote work, the threat of cyber-attacks with the potential to damage critical infrastructure and even shut down an entire plant’s operations has never been greater.

Coming off a holiday that celebrates workers across the country, today’s labor market is struggling to recover from a peak set in 2000. States whose labor market still hadn’t fully recovered from the Great Recession are facing an even greater economic disadvantage from the pandemic.

Over the last two years, foreign-born workers have faced  increased difficulty in obtaining work visas, a condition that could lead to negative impacts on the future economic prosperity of the United States. Under the Trump administration, there also has been a reduction in the cap for H-1B visas from 85,000 in 2016 to 65,000 this year.

A recent report by the National Women’s Business Council (NWBC) and the Small Business Administration (SBA) found that participation rates in the Small Business Innovation Research and Small Business Technology Transfer (SBIR/STTR) programs by women-owned small businesses (WOSB) has essentially remained flat since 2011. Although participation rates vary by awarding agency, the report highlights several barriers faced by women entrepreneurs.

The American Academy of Arts and Sciences is calling on all organizations with an interest in the public face of science to “use the resources at their disposal to support effective science communication and engagement” as part of its third and final installment in a series of reports from an initiative that began in 2016. The Public Face of Science Initiative set out to address the complex and evolving relationship between science and society.

Crystal ball forecasts and predictions are growing about the long term impact of the pandemic on U.S. manufacturing, trade and overall global supply chains. The abruptness of the shutdowns within so many countries’ economies, the resulting scarcities of goods, and millions of furloughs and pink slips has generated cause for economic analysts, policy wonks and consumers to study the effect of disruption on global value chains.

The Economic Development Administration’s Office of Innovation and Entrepreneurship (OIE) released a funding opportunity this morning for a new STEM Talent Challenge. The opportunity provides $2 million in total to governmental and nonprofit entities working to implement STEM apprenticeship models in their regions.

The product of a year-long initiative focused on addressing America’s crumbling infrastructure has been released two months early in an effort to help speed the economic recovery following the COVID-19 pandemic. The initiative, called Infrastructure: Foundation for Success, identifies four key federal priorities that should be addressed if America is to rebuild its infrastructure.

The innovation community has been on the front lines in responding to the current pandemic, and one area that has stepped up is the community makerspace. A new report from the Urban Manufacturing Alliance (UMA) highlights several of those efforts. As UMA points out, COVID-19 brought a renewed need for manufacturing capabilities, and makerspaces stepped into new roles.

A new Community College Growth Engine Fund is being launched by Education Design Lab to help mitigate the growing skills gap and strengthen community colleges as drivers of innovation between education and employment. Education Design Lab is a national nonprofit that designs, implements and scales new learning models for higher education and the future of work.

Improved prospects for economic development, as opposed to concerns about government efficiency, can play an important role in building support for local government consolidation efforts. The importance of economic opportunities in government consolidation was a key conclusion within Ball State University’s recently published policy brief, Indiana’s Government Modernization Act & Local Government Consolidation Experiences: Process and Politics.

As the global economy continues to struggle through the COVID-19 pandemic, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has released an interactive online tool for discovering success stories of small business innovation and entrepreneurship. Showcasing several of the businesses that have successfully leveraged NIH small business funding — totaling more than $1 billion annually — to develop healthcare products and services, NIH’s Small Business Education and Entrepreneurial Development (SEED) office hopes that the tool will inspire others to start businesses and develop their technologies.

Six organizations — including SSTI members Catalyst Connection and the Ohio Development Services Agency — have been designated to lead the new defense manufacturing community consortia. The Office of Economic Adjustment (OEA) has announce that these organizations are now eligible to enter the next phase of development and submit their requests for technical assistance, grants, and other support services. The Defense Manufacturing Community Support Program (DMCSP) was authorized in the 2019 National Defense Authorization Act as a new program offered by OEA.

A recent report from the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation examined the changing makeup of entrepreneurship over the period of 1996 to 2019, finding that older people, immigrants, and minorities are becoming new entrepreneurs at increasing rates.

Missouri Gov. Mike Parson last week announced that $1 million of the state’s CARES Act funding will be used to create a grant for nonprofit and university-based coworker and incubator facilities. The grant will be administered by the Missouri Technology Corporation (MTC). Organizations will be reimbursed with grant funds for expenses related to updating the facilities to encourage social distancing, adopting enhanced sanitation protocols or acquiring PPE to comply with the guidelines of the public health emergency.

The House has now passed 10 of the 12 annual appropriations bills for FY 2021. Within the total funding is support for key innovation priorities, including $35 million for EDA’s Build-to-Scale (i.e., Regional Innovation Strategies), $6 million for SBA’s innovation clusters program and $4 million for Federal and State Technology Partnerships (FAST). SSTI’s Innovation Advocacy Council had made expanding funding for each of these initiatives a priority for the year.

A leading technology association has stepped up to positively impact tech diversity and inclusion through a new challenge that aims to double the percentage of the state’s Black and Latinx tech workers — currently at 5 and 7 percent respectively — by the end of the decade.

The importance of higher education institutions in helping rural communities build innovation-based ecosystems has been detailed in a report released by the Center on Rural Innovation. Higher Ed’s Key Role In Rural Innovation Ecosystems profiles 10 colleges and universities that have been engaged in their area’s innovation environment and explores what techniques each institution has found most useful in building that ecosystem.

More than 500 colleges and universities nationwide showed warning signs in a stress test that was conducted before the pandemic according to a new series of reports by the Hechinger Report and NBC News. Declining enrollment and decreased state government support had left dozens of universities under financial stress. With the added pressures of the coronavirus pandemic, “the fabric of American higher education as become even more strained,” the report says.

The Kauffman Foundation has announced 17 organizations will share the $1.5 million in funding allocated through their Heartland Challenge. These grantees will work to solve specific challenges entrepreneurs in the heartland region — comprised of Missouri, Iowa, Nebraska, and Kansas — face, and will participate in facilitated, peer-learning communities of practice to share knowledge across the region.

While business investments towards research and development have varied among states, the overall trend throughout the country has been a positive one. Business R&D funding has weathered two recessions over the past 20 years, with many states seeing investments grow beyond their pre-recession levels. While the scope of COVID-19’s economic impact continues to grow, business R&D investment has shown a strong history of recovering from, and building beyond, national financial downturns.