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Warren Erdman, formerly vice president of corporate affairs at Kansas City Southern, is the newly selected chairman of the board of the Economic Development Corp. of Kansas City.

Michael Finney, CEO of Greater Rochester Enterprise, is leaving to become president and CEO of Ann Arbor SPARK.

Dennis "Mickey" Flynn is the new president of Pennsylvania BIO.

The West Virginia Venture Connection has named John Hale as executive director.

Kevin Holmes returned to his alma mater, Santa Clara University, to join the Leavey School of Business as executive director of its Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (CIE).

Bruce Kidd is the first director of entrepreneurship for the Indiana Economic Development Corp.

Angela Kreps is the first president of the year-old Kansas Bioscience Organization.

Cliff Long is the first full-time economic development director for Nampa, Idaho. Long had worked for the Idaho Department of Commerce for the past 14 years.

Christopher Price is the executive director for the Piedmont Triad Research Park and senior vice president, Wake Forest University Health Sciences.

Michael Tentnowski is the new director of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Incubator.

Anne Wein is the new executive director of Southeast BIO, a nonprofit organization concentrating on the growth of the life sciences industry.

For the better part of the year, lawmakers in Michigan have faced the daunting task of balancing both a budget shortfall for fiscal year 2007 and a nearly $1.6 billion deficit for FY 2008. An agreement between Gov. Jennifer Granholm and lawmakers was reached in the early morning hours of Oct. 31, following a one-month extension of the deadline and a brief government shutdown.

Listen or read the business news media and the dreaded “R” word, recession, is back in common parlance. State revenue cycles seem to feel it first. Already, with more than a dozen states projecting budget deficits for both current and coming fiscal years, it seems certain: Spending cuts in programs and services and/or tax increases are imminent. The nationwide housing market slump, the rising cost of energy and health care, and increased state spending are cited as a just a few of the reasons for shortfalls in state budgets.

Although Missouri frequently ranks in the top 20 states for federal research grants and academic R&D, the state consistently ranks much lower in the creation of new high-tech companies. A recent report by Dr. Mark Parry of the University of Missouri-Kansas City Bloch School of Business suggests that early-stage high-tech entrepreneurs and companies have been unable to secure sufficient capital to launch successful ventures.

Three major announcements were made in Singapore last month focusing on R&D of new technologies and educating the workforce to produce specialized graduates in upcoming fields.

 

One continuing challenge states and regions are attempting to overcome is adjusting their workforces in a rapidly changing, innovation-driven, global economy. The growing consensus emerging from many people examining science and technology competitiveness is that U.S. students need to be academically stronger in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields than they are today and that the supply of graduates with a science background needs to increase.

Nearly 700 new products resulting from university research handled by technology transfer offices reached the marketplace in FY 2006, according to the latest Association of University Technology Managers (AUTM) Survey of U.S. Licensing Activity released this week.

 

The 189 research performing institutions that participated in the survey also reported the creation of 553 start-ups during the year and almost 5,000 new licensing relationships with companies.

 

During the past year, the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program has garnered a great deal of attention, setting the stage for a national debate over potential changes to the well known federal program – namely the issue of participation from companies with venture-capital backing. With congressional reauthorization on the horizon for next year, SSTI examined the SBIR program in-depth during a breakout session at the annual conference in October, looking at both current status and future developments.

Edison had Menlo Park. Monet had the gardens at Giverny. Ubiquitous computing had PARC. To what extent were the great things that happened at each of these localities influenced by the places themselves? 

 

Reducing that question to economic development policy terms: Can the places of great creations be created by design?

 

Building structures that contain laboratory space are becoming an important component of many entities pursuing TBED strategies. Research spaces such as cleanrooms and wetlabs pop up throughout universities, but they also are being constructed within research parks and business incubators.

 

The theory of spatial clustering has been very popular in the TBED field for many years, as researchers attempt to explain the transformation of places like Silicon Valley and the reasons various locales are economically competitive. Practitioners have utilized the theory as a method to describe their own state and regional economies and to support the development of specific industries. As an industry cluster grows, additional benefits of agglomeration are realized.

 

The physical layouts of many colleges and universities across North America are undergoing dramatic changes as more and more relationships develop outside of the traditional boundaries of institutions of higher learning. As public-private partnerships are established, additional research parks are being built on or adjacent to campus, and in some cases, empty space is designed into new academic and research buildings to accommodate future spin-off companies and incubating firms.

 

The establishment and maintenance of research parks has been a strategy for many organizations to strengthen TBED within their regions. This strategy continues to grow, as announcements for new research parks and the expansion of established ones take place all over the U.S. and Canada. But looking at these research parks in aggregate, what can we learn about them? And what can current developments tell us about the design of research parks in the future?

 

Throughout this special issue of the Digest, we’ve explored how future trends in design may affect how TBED practitioners advance the field and how altering the organization of the physical components around us – from laboratory space to economic development organizations – may impact innovative performance. It seems an emerging field, one that is sought in the design community and one that may be welcomed by the customers of design services, is the practice of evaluating the spaces that are intended to produce innovation.

Linda Fettig was named director of the Nebraska Rural Development Commission.

Kathie Olsen, nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate, is the new deputy director of the National Science Foundation.