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Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez recently announced the creation of a 15-member advisory committee to examine methods used around the country to measure innovation. The panel, dubbed the Measuring Innovation in the 21st Century Economic Advisory Committee, will be composed of academia and private industry representatives and will convene this fall to identify new ways to assess regional innovation activity and the impact of innovation policies.

In 2004, U.S. academic R&D expenditures totaled $42.9 billion up 7.21 percent from 2003, according to the National Science Foundation's Survey of Research and Development Expenditures at Universities and Colleges, FY 2004. The NSF report details R&D expenditures at public colleges and universities by geographic location, institution, science and engineering fields, and source of funding.

 

Recognizing an immediate need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and mitigate the adverse consequences of climate change, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and British Prime Minister Tony Blair have announced their intention to become partners and act aggressively to address climate change and promote energy diversity.

For many areas of the country, the first five years of the 21st century may well be remembered as a period of dramatic economic transformation, or the beginning of one as the rate of change continues at a fast clip. Having statistics for the five-year period of 2000-2005, however, provides the first opportunity for policymakers and academic researchers to look for meaning in the trends.

American K-12 students are becoming less and less interested in math, science and technology fields. Recent studies reveal that students are increasingly dropping science and math classes and pursuing careers in the arts and social services. Since national and regional competitiveness in high-tech fields depends on a skilled labor market, fueled by college graduates in STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) fields, many areas are attempting to generate more interest in these subjects.

A new report released in conjunction with the Fourth International Competitive Brazil Congress gives a positive assessment of the country's potential as a leader in life sciences and provides useful model for competitiveness assessments in other regions. The report, Mechanisms of Innovation and Competitiveness, was prepared by the Center for the Support of Technology Development at the University of Brasilia and coordinated by the five-year-old Competitive Brazil Movement (Movimento Brasil Competitivo, MBC).

One of the hottest political topics this year is the outsourcing of U.S. jobs to other countries. A Google search on "outsourcing" returns about 4.8 million pages. Reports from Gartner, Forrester Research, McKinsey & Company, AeA, and the Institute for International Economics, among others, have looked at the topic and fed the interest.

The State Science and Technology Institute has launched its home page on the World Wide Web. The site serves as a one-stop resource for cooperative technology program managers. The site provides information on SSTI activities including information services and research.

Supporters of NIST's Advanced Technology Program (ATP) have weathered years of attempts by members of the House and the Bush Administration to eliminate the program, but this may be the biggest hurdle yet: The Senate Appropriations Committee approved language calling for the program's termination as part of the Department of Commerce fiscal year 2007 appropriations. The first of only two ATP-related sentences included in the Senate Committee report 109-580 accompanying H.R.

In a report released last week, a Toronto group says that creative industries may soon overtake ICT and business services as the fastest growing sector in the region's economy. In order to preserve this momentum and ensure that other industries benefit from the presence of a strong creative sector, the authors recommend enlisting regional leaders to create programs that support creative people, creative enterprises, affordable spaces for creative work, and a shared community vision.

"More than one-third of the nation's loss of manufacturing jobs between 2000-2005 occurred in seven Great Lakes states: Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin," write Howard Wial and Alec Friedhoff in a new paper from the Metropolitan Policy Program of the Brookings Institution.

Also released this week, and related to the negative change of U.S. manufacturing employment, is a new working paper by members of the National Bureau of Economic Research. Outsourcing Jobs? Multinationals and US Employment, by Ann Harrison and Margaret McMillan, examines the labor market decisions of U.S. multinationals at home and abroad for the years 1977 to 1999. Using firm level data collected by the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, the authors econometric model reveals changes in the employment and operations of U.S.