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College is often the time when students discover which career path they want to pursue, through coursework, internships, and hands-on experiences. New research examining state minimum wage increases, however, shows how budget pressures can disrupt access to these formative opportunities and ultimately affect who enters STEM careers.  

As the first group of Tech Hub awardees approaches the end of their first year of implementation funding, hubs are gathering their consortia to share progress and chart next steps. As part of SSTI’s work with the Technology-based Economic Development (TBED) Community of Practice, program director Casey Nemecek attended the annual consortium meetings for two hubs in October: the Sustainable Polymers Tech Hub and the Nevada Tech Hub. 

The U.S. Department of the Treasury (Treasury) recently issued three new FAQs for the State Small Business Credit Initiative 2.0 (SSBCI) program. These FAQs clarify and reiterate the timeline for the end of the Capital Program, and the deadlines by which participating jurisdictions must request disbursement of any remaining allocated Capital Program funds.

In summary:

Note: The research careers for this year’s triple winners support the underlying arguments for public involvement in technology-based economic development. Well-designed and sustained public-private regional innovation initiatives—the work of SSTI and its member organizations—can make a positive difference for local competitiveness.  

With federal R&D investments unlikely to keep pace with inflation or international competition based on the administration’s budget request, cuts to existing research grants, and Congress’s inability to pass a budget, business R&D investments become more critical for sustaining the competitiveness of regional innovation economies.

The Q3 2025 investment data is in, and trends of fewer deals and more dollars continue.

Commercializing patented inventions is a common goal of innovation policy, as it drives company revenues and regional economic growth. However, tracking the commercialization of inventions stemming from R&D is challenging. While programs like the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program are explicitly designed to encourage commercialization, most evaluation tools rely on approaches that may be anecdotal or incomplete, such as surveys, case studies, or patent counts.

From 2022 to 2023, domestic R&D expenditures increased 4%, or $29 billion, but remained nearly unchanged when adjusted for inflation. This apparent slowdown follows a streak averaging nearly 12% ($59 billion) year-over-year growth from 2018 to 2022, and 8% over the past decade from 2014 to 2023. Adjusting for inflation paints a different picture of the growth trends, with a more modest annual average of 8% from 2018 to 2022 and 6% over the past decade.

SSTI recently examined the investment histories of 31 Venture Development Organizations (VDOs) across 20 states to quantify their impact and help to characterize how the broader technology-based economic development (TBED) community supports long-term innovation-driven economic and financial returns. Our top-level findings showed that

After a nine-month hiatus, the Economic Development Administration has reopened its Public Works and Economic Adjustment Assistance programs with an updated Notice of Funding Opportunity.

Like the broader metric of R&D intensity, the prominence of R&D value added in a state’s economic output has shifted within several states over the past decade. Does it matter? For sustaining a state’s innovation competitiveness, it may, and subsequently it is important to know for many state and regional TBED initiatives. Proximity to the conduct of R&D has been well documented in empirical research to support strong regional innovation economies.

As the end of the fiscal year approaches, Congress is again at a critical juncture in reauthorizing the SBIR and STTR programs.

As attention-grabbing as AI might be for the media and large investors (see previous SSTI analysis of AI investment), economic growth through innovation in life sciences and biotechnology is a priority for many state and regional TBED initiatives.  The venture capital market recognizes that as well.

Conventional TBED wisdom for decades has been that small businesses generate more innovation in the United States. All big tech companies started as scrappy little companies in their respective eras of IT’s rapid growth. But there remains a long-running debate about whether large firms with financial resources and R&D capacity have an innovation advantage over smaller but more agile firms.