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The Senate appropriations committee advanced a set of FY 2024 funding bills this morning that largely continue level funding from FY 2023.

SSTI’s Annual Conference is in Atlanta this Sept. 6-8. The event will feature numerous opportunities to connect with your peers from across the country who are working to strengthen their regional innovation economies through roundtables focused on specific areas of practice and workshops on communications, building stronger organizations, and diversity, equity, and inclusion. The entire conference is available for a registration fee of just $390.

It appears that innovation is contagious. Maps reveal that once there is a concentration of patents granted to inventors in one U.S. county, innovation starts to percolate in neighboring counties. And the phenomenon isn’t found only in established life sciences hubs like San Diego or Boston. SSTI observed this spillover effect in Washtenaw County, Michigan and Hennepin County, Minnesota, among other places. These data suggest that when a strong base is located, likely due to new companies and startups establishing themselves, innovation lays down its roots and spreads to other counties.

The U.S. Economic Development Administration has recently made multiple staff appointments for its national program offices. Cristina Killingsworth is now EDA’s deputy assistant secretary for policy and external Affairs, having formerly been chief of staff for the International Trade Administration.

Did you use the Recompete Mapping Tool to check your eligibility for this new EDA funding opportunity when the fact sheet and map were first released? If you did, and you got the response, “Contact your local economic development office” don’t stop there! EDA has updated its mapping tool in the past few days to reflect significant flexibility in program eligibility.

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has reduced its funding for the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) programs. The cut at the Office of Science—the agency’s primary program administrator—appears to be about 35%. The change resulted from congressional direction that the agency had miscalculated its SBIR set-aside and is intended to make the Office of Science’s calculation more consistent with that of the other programs in DOE.

NIST has released a plan to make its scientific data and publications more readily available and accessible, following a memo from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) instructing all government agencies to do so.

The Acting Secretary of Labor (Secretary) requests nominations of qualified candidates to be considered for appointment to the Advisory Committee on Apprenticeship (ACA) for the 2023-2025 membership term. Registered Apprenticeship is highly dependent on its stakeholders' and partners' engagement and involvement for its operational effectiveness.

The Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC) announced $44.4 million in 54 awards to help expand and diversify the economy in Appalachia’s coal-impacted communities through the Partnerships for Opportunity and Workforce and Economic Revitalization (POWER) Initiative. One third (more than $14.6 million) of these investments will develop business incubators, increase access to capital, and provide other services to advance entrepreneurship in Kentucky, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and West Virginia.

As more households rely on faster forms of internet, broadband internet service has begun to be treated as a necessity in the home and workplace. But its use has varied by generation; according to Pew Research Center, 99% of US adults ages 18-29 report using the internet, while only 75% of senior citizens (65+) can say the same.

On June 26, 2023, the U.S. government announced allocations from the $42.45 Billion Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program. These funds, allocated to all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and five territories, are intended to close the digital divide in the U.S., as funding will be used to deploy or upgrade broadband networks to ensure that everyone in the U.S. has access to reliable, affordable, high-speed Internet service.

Today, the Supreme Court ended Affirmative Action on college campuses.

Connecticut Governor Ned Lamont has signed into law a bill that establishes a green jobs corps program. This program will identify a talent development strategy for communities to address the impacts of climate change and reduce carbon emissions. The bill includes several provisions to accomplish those goals and a plan to market and recruit these jobs to individuals, especially from underrepresented populations.

The U.S.

The Economic Development Administration (EDA) has updated its Comprehensive Economic Development Strategy (CEDS) Content Guidelines, effective April 2023. CEDS are strategy-driven plans for economic development prepared through a regionally owned planning process.

A trio of reports from the U.S. Department of Energy showed a continued upward trend in wind energy capacity and employment in 2018, as the cost per megawatt (MW) continued to drop due to larger and more efficient turbines. However, the possible elimination of federal tax incentives could slow the long-term growth of wind power, the report cautioned.

The U.S.

The House and Senate are working toward FY 2024 appropriations, but not even a negotiated agreement has kept the chambers moving in the same direction. Today, the Senate appropriations committee directed its subcommittees to produce bills that align with the slight reduction in non-defense spending agreed to in the debt ceiling agreement reached earlier this month.

On May 30, 2023, FCC released a broadband map that had been updated to reflect states' challenges to the availability data for more than 4 million locations throughout the U.S. Seventy-five percent of those challenges had been resolved in the new map. The new map reflected a net increase of more than one million new serviceable locations that had not appeared on the previous map.

The Distressed Area Recompete Pilot Program (Recompete Pilot Program)—authorized by the CHIPS and Science Act— will invest $200 million toward interventions that spur economic activity in geographically diverse and persistently distressed communities nationwide. The program will support economic revitalization in distressed communities across the country.

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the Hollings Manufacturing Extension Partnership (MEP) have all made recent announcements on new funding provided either through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law or the CHIPS and Science Act. DoE is accepting applications for an $80 million program focused on benefiting small and medium-sized manufacturing firms. USDA and MEP announced more than 170 awards to expand innovative uses of wood and to address supply chain issues.

A recent report from global management consulting firm A.T. Kearney calls into doubt the ability of U.S. trade policy in encouraging domestic manufacturing firms to reshore their production efforts. Following the government’s release of 2018 trade data, A.T. Kearney published the findings from its sixth annual Reshoring Index, which compares year-over-year changes in U.S.

The Department of Labor recently announced awards totaling $183.8 million in Scaling Apprenticeships Through Sector-Based Strategies grants. Funded through H-1B visa fees, the grants will support the training of more than 85,000 apprentices. The grantees include 23 academic institutions and grant-matching industry consortia representing 18 states, and includes three SSTI members — the University of Cincinnati, Lorain County Community College and the State University of New York Research Foundation.

On June 14, 2023, NSF announced 34 semifinalists for the first-ever NSF Regional Innovation Engines (NSF Engines) competition. The NSF Engines will be led by universities, nonprofits, businesses, and other organizations from across U.S. states and territories. Each NSF Engine could receive up to $160 million over 10 years; actual amounts will be subject to a given NSF Engine's status and overall progress, as assessed annually.

Federal and private R&D portfolios are investing heavily in designing and refining the key innovation components of the transition to cyber-physical systems of production: artificial intelligence, automation, IoT, advanced materials, and dynamic, decentralized decision making to name a few elements. There also is a fair amount of buzz about Industry 4.0 from the big manufacturing consultants and around industry trade shows.  Innovation and optimization, however, appear to be two very distant points on a continuum for both U.S.