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The Communities That Work Partnership, a national project to support industry-led workforce development efforts, has released seven case studies highlighting what it considers to be best practices for regions seeking ways to strengthen talent pipelines for local employers and improve access to quality employment for jobseekers. Launched in April 2015 by the Aspen Institute Workforce Strategies Initiative and the Economic Development Administration, with additional support from the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, the partnership has two goals: to accelerate regional economic development through peer learning, and to document stories of how regional teams can improve links between the demand side and supply side of regional systems.

On September 2, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott announced $7.2 million in funding for the newly established Texas Industry Cluster Innovative Academies. An element of Gov. Abbott’s Tri-Agency Workforce Initiative established in March 2016, the initiative will provide competitive grant funding to establish Innovative Academies within Texas high schools to provide students with learning opportunities in high-demand occupations while earning college course credit prior to high school graduation.

As the school year kicks off, several corporate foundations have announced new commitments to support hands-on K-12 science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) experiences for children across the country. These new partnerships continue a trend of corporate funders bypassing funding for STEM curriculum development to focus on active learning experiences that are shown to have positive impact on STEM retention.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has announced the recipients of 37 Design and Development Launch Pilots as part of its INCLUDES initiative. NSF INCLUDES invests in alliances and partnerships that seek to broaden STEM participation among underrepresented groups, including women, Hispanics, African Americans, Native Americans, persons with disabilities, people from rural areas and people of low socioeconomic status.

The U.S. Census Bureau announced on Tuesday that median household income increased to $56,516 in 2015, a jump of 5.2 percent from the 2014 median income of $53,718 and the first increase since 2007.  However, real median household income in 2015 was 1.6 percent lower than in 2007, the year before the Great Recession, and 2.4 percent lower than the median household income peak, which occurred in 1999.

Researchers of American entrepreneurship now have a timelier socio-economic portrait of the nation’s employer-owned businesses as a result of a public-private partnership between the U.S. Census Bureau, the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Minority Business Development Agency, and the Kauffman Foundation.

Over the last month, the Economic Development Administration (EDA) announced over $8 million in grants to expand entrepreneurial and business support services in Alabama, New York, and Texas including:

In August, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced over $40 million in available federal funding for a new DHS Center of Excellence (COE) for Homeland Security Quantitative Analysis via two federal funding opportunities (FFO).

To improve private sector partnerships and increase commercialization efforts, the national labs should consider establishing external nonprofit entities to manage their commercialization efforts, according to a new report from Innovation Associates Inc.

Immigrant entrepreneurs would be allowed to remain in the United States for an initial period of up to two years, and, conditional upon meeting certain benchmarks, could potentially stay in the country for one additional period of up to three years under a newly proposed rule by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) branch of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS). As part of the International Entrepreneur Rule, which is now open for a 45-day comment period, certain international entrepreneurs would have an opportunity to start or scale their businesses in the United States. In an official blog post by White House Office of Science and Technology Policy Deputy Director for Technology and Innovation Tom Kalil and Assistant Director for Entrepreneurship Doug Rand, the authors note that the new reform would propose clear criteria to identify those entrepreneurs with the potential to provide significant public benefit to the United States. Evaluating entrepreneurs on a case-by-case basis, the proposed rule would consider factors such as: the entrepreneur’s ownership stake (at least 15 percent) and leadership role in the startup; the growth potential of the startup; competitive research grants of at least $100,000 from federal, state, and local government agencies provided to the firm; and the investment of at least $345,000 by qualified American investors.

The U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA), and its federal partners, announced the winners of its third annual Growth Accelerator Fund Competition on August 31. The 68 winners in 32 states and the District of Columbia were judged by more than 100 experts from both the public and private sector with entrepreneurial, investment, startup, economic development, capital formation and academic backgrounds.

The Department of Energy (DOE) recently announced that 43 small businesses had been selected to participate in the second round of its Small Business Voucher (SBV) pilot project, and was collectively awarded more than $8 million for a wide range of R&D clean energy, public-private sector innovation activities.

The big data technology and services market is expected to grow at a compound annual rate of 23.1 percent over the 2014-2019 forecast period, with annual spending projected to reach$48.6 billion in 2019, according to a 2015 study from IDC – a market research firm. Hoping to leverage this exponential growth into research and economic development opportunity, several universities are fund raising to establish new big data R&D Centers in the communities they serve.

As policymakers and economic developers grow to recognize the need to create broader opportunities for prosperity to sustain future national competitiveness, four facts reveal one of the complex and compounding factors hampering productive participation from a significant segment of our population:  

A popular development strategy at the state and regional level, incubators seek to support economic growth by providing entrepreneurs with business assistance, access to capital, and networking. As of 2012, approximately one-third of the 1,250 business incubators in the United States were connected with universities, up from one-fifth in 2006, according to International (formerly National) Business Incubation Association data featured in The New York Times. Despite the proliferation of these programs at universities, there have been relatively few conclusions to date on the impacts of these incubators beyond anecdotes. Recent research from faculty at the University of Central Florida (UCF), however, finds evidence that firms in university incubators experience positive growth in number of employees and sales at a statistically significant rate compared to non-university incubated firms. On average, the authors find that university incubated firms were responsible for 3.965 more jobs than non-university incubated firms.

Opportunities for successful workforce development partnerships exist across a variety of industries and geographies, according to a recently released report from the Community Development Department at the Cleveland Fed. The report, Addressing Employment Needs through Sector Partnerships, includes five case studies from throughout the Federal Reserve’s Fourth District, which contains Western Pennsylvania, Eastern Kentucky, the panhandle of West Virginia and all of Ohio. Although sector-based initiatives have been around for quite some time, the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act, whose final regulations became publicly available in June 2016, places a strong emphasis on aligning education and job training with employer needs, according to the report’s authors Kyle Fee, Matt Klesta, and Lisa Nelson.

In the last five years, federal agencies have undertaken 116 price competitions and challenges that have helped the agencies “spur innovation, engage citizen solvers, address tough problems, and advance their core missions” as well as provide a cost savings for the agencies, according to a new report the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) released

The National Science Foundation (NSF) is entertaining proposals to support “academe-industry partnerships, which are led by an interdisciplinary academic research team collaborating with at least one industry partner in order to carry out research to advance, adapt, and integrate technology(ies) into a specified, human-centered smart service system.” Through the Building Innovation Capacity (BIC) element of the Partnerships for Innovation program, NSF intends to make up to $10 million in grants to support research partnerships working on projects that operate in the post-fundame

Startup activity in the United States has increased for the second straight year after declining throughout the Great Recession and the years that followed, according to a newly updated index from the Kauffman Foundation. The metropolitan areas with the highest levels in 2016 Kauffman Index of Startup Activity are Austin, Miami, and Los Angeles. Among large states, the most startup activity according to the 2016 index were in Texas, Florida, and California, while Montana, Nevada, and Wyoming had the highest levels among smaller states.

Startup failure is the rule, not the exception. However, much startup ”failure” includes businesses that made a workable product and grew — just not fast enough to attract venture capital. A hybrid venture capital-private equity approach is trying to identify these slower-growing businesses as part of an investment model that may provide an exit strategy for spurned startups throughout the country.

The Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit ruled against the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) plan that would allow municipalities to build their own broadband network – superseding state laws in Tennessee and North Carolina that explicitly prohibit such projects. The FCC claimed that the Telecommunications Act of 1996 granted it implicit power to preempt state laws that are intended to support open markets for private-sector utility companies.

On July 25, the Small Business Administration (SBA) released a framework that allows qualifying small and disadvantaged businesses to obtain developmental assistance from mentor companies (both large and small businesses) and form joint ventures with those mentors to pursue government contracts.

To help the Federal Transit Administration (FTA) prepares its next five-year research strategic plan, FTA invites stakeholders from across the country to participate in the crafting of the plan by providing ideas and other comments to establish a framework to guide how the federal entity prioritizes and invests in research activities over the next several years.

Since the beginning of July, the Economic Development Administration (EDA) has announced almost $7.3 million in grants to support advanced manufacturing and support workforce development efforts in communities impacted by the decline coal industry. In Florida and Washington, the EDA announced funding to support the facilities that can house local manufacturing firms and provide the space and equipment necessary for them to create jobs.