The Federal Trade Commission has issued a final rule to promote competition by banning noncompetes against workers nationwide.
Many federal funding programs have the potential to support technology-based economic development (TBED) initiatives, even when technology and innovation aren’t their explicit focus. This is the case with the Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC). SSTI recently sat down with Christy Johnson, ARC program analyst, to learn how three of ARC’s funding opportunities can support TBED activities in the Appalachian region.
Pending congressional appropriations, NSF announced a solicitation for a new set of NSF Regional Innovation Engines (NSF Engines). These NSF Engines would be in addition to the 10 inaugural engines the agency announced in January. In this proposed round of funding, NSF would only accept proposals for full NSF Engines, competing for up to $160 million over 10 years.
SSTI and more than 160 state and local governments, institutions of higher education, businesses, trade associations, and nonprofit organizations sent a letter to Congress asking for Tech Hubs appropriations in the FY 2025 budget.
The U.S. Department of Commerce has recently signed two non-binding preliminary memorandums of terms (PMTs) with semiconductor companies to provide direct funding under the CHIPS and Science Act. One company, the TSMC Arizona Corporation (TSMC Arizona), a subsidiary of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company Limited (TSMC), will receive up to $6.6 billion to support the company’s investment of more than $65 billion in three greenfield fabs in Phoenix, Arizona.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have posted the position for director, Hollings Manufacturing Extension Partnership (MEP) Program after the recent announcement that the previous director had left to become director of the CDFI Fund. The director “directs and controls the activities of the MEP,” according to the posting.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has announced its selections for $20 billion in grant awards under two competitions within the $27 billion Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund (GGRF).
Sometime in late May, the U.S. will pass a deadline that could have major repercussions for new administration rules, depending on the outcome of the 2024 federal elections. In effect, rules finalized before late May would be overturned only by going through a new, full rulemaking process, which can be a lengthy process. Rules passed after that date, however, could be overturned relatively quickly by Congress if control of the branches changes.
In Mississippi, the state auditor released a report in September 2023 that rated academic degrees by whether the degree would lead to a well-paying job. He suggests that Mississippi invest more in programs in the subject areas leading to those high-paying, in-state jobs. Basing appropriations on immediate wage outcomes implies that near-term economic return is the only benefit that matters, and it is a theme that is recurring frequently.
The Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC) recently awarded new grants totaling over $16.4 million to boost green energy manufacturing and workforce development through its Appalachian Regional Initiative for Stronger Economies (ARISE) funding opportunity.
The Commerce Department has suspended plans to announce a funding opportunity for the construction, modernization, or expansion of commercial semiconductor R&D facilities, according to an announcement the CHIPS Program Office made in their newsletter last week. The suspension does not impact the $11 billion the CHIPS Program Office still plans to spend on semiconductor R&D through separate R&D programs, nor does it affect the awards for incentive program funding opportunities already announced.
The third quarter of 2023 continues the venture capital market’s recent two-year decline in investments, investors, and initial public offerings. This puts a squeeze on startups.
SSTI has updated data across four states, and added data for an additional two and Puerto Rico, in last week’s “SSBCI 2.0: An overview of state uses of funds” article.
Shrinking shares of job-creating, high-growth firms across the country, the topic of SSTI’s Useful Stats column in last week’s Digest, is not being experienced within all sectors of the economy, according to analysis of the Business Dynamics Statistics of High Growth Firms (BDS-HG) experimental dataset from the Census Bureau.
This article, written by Leonardo Vasquez and reproduced from the April 2024 issue of NBER Digest, is a summary of NBER Working Paper 31948, prepared by Luisa Gagliardi, Enrico Moretti, and Michael Seranfelli.
Last week, a Senate committee heard Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo and National Science Foundation Director Sethuraman Panchanathan discuss CHIPS & Science Act program implementation (similar to a September hearing in the House).
Editor’s note (April 4, 2024): This article has been updated to reflect relevant programs included in the second of two FY 2024 omnibus appropriations bills.
Two senior leaders of state programs designed to help commercialize new intellectual property joined a TBED CoP webinar last week to discuss how they determine whether those initiatives are successful. John Hardin, executive director of the Office of Science, Technology & Innovation at the NC Department of Commerce, described the One NC Small Business Program and the evaluation process the office performs each year. They use surveys of award recipients and econometric analysis to demonstrate the program’s effectiveness.
In the 1970s, the U.S. government took antitrust actions against IBM and AT&T, causing considerable controversy. Walter Wriston, the then-president of Citibank and a key leader on Wall Street, questioned the value of doing this, apparently (according to Lina M. Khan, Federal Trade Commission Chair), likening the move to breaking up the Yankees, because they were so successful. In a presentation she delivered at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace on March 13, Lina M. Khan, chair of the Federal Trade Commission, disagreed with Wriston’s perspective.
High-growth firms are often conflated with all other firms. Unfortunately, this tendency makes it extremely difficult to differentiate those with a higher likelihood of significantly impacting the economy and innovation.
While some college computer engineering profs may be advising their students not to worry about artificial intelligence derailing their salary projections and long-term career options, it would appear businesses are getting on with deploying the latest AI advances as quickly as possible to see what improvements might be made for the firms’ productivity rates and bottom lines. A recently released working paper from Germany’s Fraunhofer Institute for Systems and Innovation Research (Fraunhofer ISI) reports on an early analysis of AI adoption in the innovation research process.
The Department of Defense announced yesterday that it issued $238 million from "Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors (CHIPS) and Science Act" funding for the establishment of eight Microelectronics Commons (Commons) regional innovation hubs. With $2 billion in funding for Fiscal Years 2023 through 2027, the Microelectronics Commons program aims to leverage these hubs to accelerate domestic hardware prototyping and "lab-to-fab" transition of semiconductor technologies.
Information on the geographic distribution of innovation and entrepreneurship is not easy to tease out of many federal statistical data sets, leading regional policy often to be based on trends in all business starts or life span and size—ignoring the fact that some firms have greater impact on regional economic growth than others. The U.S. Census Bureau is well aware of the challenge and, earlier this week, released an experimental data set that allows for an examination of state-level long-term trends in the change in high-growth firms and establishments across the nation.
As part of the CHIPS & Science Act, Congress created the Tech Hubs program to help more regions become leaders in key technology sectors through substantial investments into regional consortia. It authorized spending $10 billion on the program from FY2023 through FY2027. But appropriations for the program are not keeping up with the vision that was embraced by strong bipartisan majorities in both chambers. For FY2023, Congress appropriated $500 million for the program, and it followed that up with only $41 million for FY2024. The need for the program has not changed.