The Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU) on Sunday announced what it is calling the “largest ever collaborative effort” to increase college access, close the achievement gap and award “hundreds of thousands” more degrees by 2025. The initiative, called Powered by Publics: Scaling Student Success, includes 130 public universities and systems working within clusters of four to 12 to both advance those goals and share aggregate data. The diversity of the institutions that are participating is intended to help create a playbook of success reforms that can then be used at other institutions.

The Federal Reserve System released a new digital book – Investing in America's Workforce: Improving Outcomes for Workers and Employers – that challenges the existing American mindset that treats workers as a cost to industry. Instead, the authors contend that industry and communities across the country must view workers as assets that with investment can create significant returns including greater productivity, faster national income growth, and a more vibrant and satisfied pool of working Americans. To help shift this mindset, the book brings together more than 100 experts to explore contemporary research, best practices, and resources related to workforce development. The authors also propose a set of  steps to develop well-structured, effective workforce programs and public policy that could result in better economic outcomes for individuals, businesses, and their communities.

For communities hoping to start and register an apprenticeship program, a new toolkit by the Department of Labor may offer some insight. Launched as part of National Apprenticeship Week (Nov. 12-18, 2018), “Building Registered Apprenticeship Programs” provides a guide to help start and register your apprenticeship program. The toolkit includes five steps: exploration of apprenticeships as a strategy to meet regional needs; partnerships with key players to develop the program; building the core components of the program; registration with the broader apprenticeship network; and, launching the program.

While diversity plays a critical role in both improving the quality and increasing the rate of innovation, women and several minority groups remain underrepresented in STEM fields. Several studies find that improving the retention rate of women and other underrepresented groups in STEM at the college level can have significant impacts on improving the diversity and representativeness of the STEM workforce. For women and other underrepresented groups, the college experience can create unique roadblocks and barriers that ultimately cause them to switch majors or even leave college. Several recent studies have examined strategies to improve the retention rate of women and other underrepresented groups in STEM degrees at institution of higher education. The strategies range from pre-college STEM academies to establishing cohorts of underrepresented students.

This week we continue our four-part series focused on navigating innovation priorities in a variety of settings. Part 2 focuses on how to create and hone an effective value proposition for your organizations given different audiences, funding sources, public support and the needs of clients. SSTI spoke with Faith Knutsen, director of Social Entrepreneurship and Innovation, Ohio University Voinovich School of Leadership and Public Affairs; and Steve Glynn, director of Innovation, The Water Council.

The series features interviews with experts in the field, each of whom will also be presenting at our annual conference, where these topics will be explored in greater depth. Both presenters featured in this week’s Q&A said their session will be fun, personally and professionally engaging, and highly relevant to each participant’s own sector.  Click here for more information on the conference.

Monday’s widely covered release of a report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) outlining the climate change impacts that could be avoided by limiting  global warming to 1.5°C sounded an alarm bell of scenarios that could ensue if no corrective action is taken. The report includes a summary for policy makers and finds that limiting global warming would require rapid and far-reaching transitions in land, energy, industry and cities. Another report from IPCC released earlier and overshadowed by the global impact report, focuses on specific ways cities around the world could develop a strategic framework to cope with the impacts of climate change. The Cities IPCC report contains input from more than 700 scientists, policy researchers, civic leaders and practitioners from across the planet in a wide range of disciplines, and includes a research and action agenda.

An evaluation of the One North Carolina Small Business Matching Fund, a statewide initiative providing grants of up to $50,000 to recent SBIR/STTR awardees, suggests that the program is achieving its goals of creating high-skill, high-wage jobs. Over the past 10 funding cycles, the $17.2 million deployed across 250 small businesses has created or retained more than 900 innovation-oriented jobs, and raised an additional $5.6 million in tax revenue for the state, according to the analysis performed by the NC Department of Commerce.

In honor of National Manufacturing day last week, the Trump administration released the Strategy for American Leadership in Advanced Manufacturing. Developed in partnership with the National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) and the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), the report is intended to outline the administration’s vision for American leadership in advanced manufacturing across industrial sectors. It advocates pursuing three goals: develop and transition new manufacturing technologies; educate, train, and connect the manufacturing workforce; and, expand the capabilities of the domestic manufacturing supply chain.

While women comprise approximately 33 percent of the combined founder and employee workforce at startup companies, they hold just 9 percent of all equity value in those companies, according to The Gap Table from Carta – a software platform for managing startup equity and ownership. The new report was based upon capitalization table (cap table) data from more than 6,000 companies with a combined total of nearly $45 billion in equity value. The cap table is a list of owners of a company and includes information about the percentages of ownership, equity dilution, and value of equity in each round of investment. The researchers found that:

• Women make up 35 percent of equity-holding employees, but only hold 20 percent of employee equity; and,
• Women make up 13 percent of founders, but hold 6 percent of founder equity.

Despite an uneven economic recovery, fewer Americans are living in distressed communities and more are living in prosperous ones, according to a recent report from the Economic Innovation Group (EIG), a Washington, D.C.-based policy and advocacy organization. Comprised of seven factors measuring socioeconomic health, the Distressed Community Index (DCI) divides the country’s zip codes (communities) into five quintiles — prosperous, comfortable, mid-tier, at-risk, and distressed — and tells the story of the country’s economic health across two time periods, the recession years of 2007 to 2011 and the recovery years of 2012 to 2016. EIG finds that the employment and business establishment growth during the economic recovery has been mostly limited to prosperous communities, where the population tends to be more educated and the housing vacancy rate may be lower.

Across the country, there are nearly 6.9 million scientists and engineers, representing 4.8 percent of the nation’s workforce. There are 20 states having at least 100,000 workers in these occupations. Scientists and engineers are concentrated around the nation’s capital, making up the largest share of the workforce in Washington D.C., Maryland, and Virginia. From 2003 to 2017, the number of scientists and engineers grew the fastest in Arkansas, North Dakota, and Utah. With an interactive map and downloadable spreadsheet, this article breaks down the changes in the science and engineering workforce across the United States over the last 15 years.

The Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC) announced its latest round of grants for Partnerships for Opportunity and Workforce and Economic Revitalization (POWER). The 35 grants totaling $26.5 million support workforce training and education in manufacturing, technology, healthcare, and other industry sectors; invest in infrastructure enhancements to continue developing the region's tourism, entrepreneurial, and agriculture sectors; and, increase access to community-based capital, including impact-investing funds, venture capital, and angel investment streams. The awards are projected to create or retain over 5,400 jobs and leverage more than $193 million in private investment into 59 Appalachian counties.

A few of the awards (with SSTI members in boldface) are highlighted here:

Still treated as a novelty by most mainstream U.S. media, there is growing global use of nature-inspired innovations to deal with a number of challenges and undesired properties of business-as-usual, whether it be infrastructure, agriculture or product design, production, use or disposal. Collectively comprising a number of approaches —such as biomimicry, green chemistry, or regenerative manufacturing — nature-inspired innovation incorporates design and use principles borrowed from and complementary to nature.  The most promising aspects of all of these efforts are their economic value and efficiency compared to life cycle analyses of similar products and processes development through conventional means.

The National League of Cities is asking local public, private, and civic leaders to make new, measurable, and impactful commitments to increasing the adoption of technology, improving the climate for entrepreneurship, and expanding youth and adult opportunities in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) at the local level. By making a commitment, NLC invites cities to take part in its City Innovation Ecosystems program, which seeks to help local leaders achieve their goals by marketing and branding best practices, providing technical assistance, promoting peer learnings, and connecting cities to national private and philanthropic partners. NLC will highlight accepted commitments at its City Summit in Los Angeles from November 7-10.

At the end of this month, applications are due for two of the federal government’s most notable programs for funding clusters and regional innovation initiatives: the SBA’s Regional Innovation Clusters (RIC) program and the EDA’s Regional Innovation Strategies (RIS) program. As practitioners develop their proposals for these programs, it is worth considering potential lessons learned from the successes of previous awardees and the major challenges they have faced.

Last week, SSTI looked at an academic research study on the impact that accelerator feedback has on firms. This week, we examine two recent academic studies that looked at the impact accelerators have on regional innovation systems. In the first study from researchers at USC and Rice University, Fehder and Yael Hochberg found that the introduction of an accelerator into a metro area helped to stimulate startup capital. In another recent study, two City University of New York researchers and one from Michigan State University contend that there are three distinct types of accelerators that serve different roles in an innovation system. They include deal-flow makers, welfare stimulators, and ecosystem builders.

The ability of states to deliver the services promised to its residents relies on their fiscal soundness. With most states beginning their fiscal year in July, SSTI has reviewed the current fiscal standing for each state and here presents a snapshot of our findings.

Most states ended their fiscal year with a surplus and continue to recover from the Great Recession, with a growing economy and job gains. However, they face continuing demands on their budgets, with expanded Medicaid payments and the growing opioid crisis confronting nearly every state. Such decisions affect the state’s ability to fund innovation efforts, from the amount of support available for higher education and STEM programs, to funding for entrepreneurship, and forging public private partnerships to strengthen innovation programming that the private sector cannot fully support.

Our analysis found that some states that rely on the energy sector to fund their spending priorities continue to struggle, while others are already factoring in anticipated revenues as a result of new Supreme Court rulings involving gaming and online sales tax collections.