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This week, President Obama issued an executive order in an attempt to make the Presidential Innovation Fellows program a permanent part of the federal government.

Finding private-sector champions, building strong mentor networks, and creating organizational flexibility rank among the most critical elements of success, according to leaders of the 2014 Excellence in TBED award recipients. Expert insights on how these and other issues can be addressed are found in the latest SSTI Awards podcast series.

Between 2007 and 2012, the number of women-owned businesses in the U.S. grew by more than 27 percent, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s Survey of Business Owners. The agency reports that women owned about 9.9 million businesses in 2012, about 36 percent of all firms. In 2007, only 29 percent of businesses were owned by women.  Business ownership also appears to have become a bit more racially diverse during those years, with the share of minority business-owners growing from 21 percent to 29 percent.

Due to a lack of activity by the state’s three privately-run regional EB-5 centers that serve the state of Maine, the Maine Department of Economic and Community Development (MECD) is considering launching its own EB-5 visa program to attract more direct foreign investment to the state, according to the Bangor Daily News.

Despite media reports that the most recent economic recovery has been largely driven by job growth in low-paying positions, a new report from the Georgetown Center for Workforce and Education finds that it is actually high-paying jobs that are leading this growth, and nearly all of them are going to individuals with at least a college degree.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology's (NIST) Hollings Manufacturing Extension Partnership (MEP) is conducting three regional forums on the proposed recompetition of MEP Centers in 11 states and Puerto Rico. The regional forums are intended to provide interested entities more information about the MEP program, the federal funding opportunity and answers to any questions regarding the funding announcement prior to its targeted release of January 2016.

Over the past few weeks, the State of Oregon has announced a number of new capital opportunities for small businesses. Business Oregon, the state’s economic development agency, will invest $250,000 to support a new Inclusive Startup Fund that will invest in Portland-area startups founded by women and people of color. Fund leaders hope to raise a total of $3 million and match portfolio businesses with mentoring and business advising services.

On December 4, the Canadian government revealed their national Science and Technology (S&T) Strategy – Seizing Canada's Moment: Moving Forward in Science, Technology and Innovation 2014.  An update to the original report released in 2007, the S&T strategy identifies five priority research areas for federal support over the next seven years: environment and agriculture; health and life sciences; natural resources and energy; information and communications technology; and, advanced manufacturing.

Last week, the Department of Agriculture (USDA) held a special meeting that include approximately 100 investors and venture capitalists to help stimulate private sector investments in rural infrastructure projects with the potential to spur economic development in small towns and rural communities across the country. Through its U.S.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) released a request for information (RFI) that invites comments and suggestions from the public to help in the development of its new five-year strategic plan.

Conducted by the National League of Cities (NLC), the Local Economic Conditions Survey 2015 asks government officials in more than 250 cities across the nation to assess their local economic conditions. Painting a broad picture of the economic health of cities, Cities and Unequal Recovery highlights key points from the most recent survey.

Total venture capital investment rose 95 percent in 20 of the world’s top startup ecosystems from 2013-2014, according to The Global Startup Ecosystem Ranking 2015 – a 160-report from Compass, formerly Startup Genome. Compass researchers also found that the global startup ecosystem landscape is maturing rapidly with non-Silicon Valley ecosystems capturing 14 percent more of the exit value pie in three years (2012-2014). In 2014, non-Silicon Valley startup ecosystems captured 59 percent of the value of all startup exits, up from approximately 45 percent in 2012.

Now that many governors have signed spending bills and legislative sessions are drawing to a close, the SSTI Digest will check on the status of proposals related to the innovation economy, and examine the state of technology-based economic development funding in the states. This week, we review spending bills in Delaware, Hawaii, Oregon, and Wisconsin.

Vice President Joe Biden announced that the Research Foundation for the State University of New York will receive a $110 million federal grant from the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory to lead the American Institute for Manufacturing Integrated Photonics (AIM-Photonics). The Department of Defense-funded grant will be supplemented by a $250 million investment from the state of New York with additional funding commitments from public and private partners expected to exceed $245 million over the next five years.

Between 1998 and 2010, impact investment funds outperformed funds of the same size, according to the Wall Street Journal. Impact-focused funds of $100 million or less posted a 9.5 percent pooled net internal rate of return, outperforming the 4.5 percent delivered by funds of the same size that were not focused on impact investments.

Located just a 20-minutes from New York City, Newark has long existed in the shadow of its much larger neighbor. Despite this, Newark’s downtown received an important boost to its innovation ecosystem this week with the announcement of Newark Venture Partners, a venture capital fund and accelerator.

Venture capital (VC) firms invested more than $17 billion in 1,189 deals in the second quarter of 2015, the highest level of activity since 2000, according to the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA) and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC). Megadeals (deals greater than $100 million) in the software sector drove much of the growth, with 26 deals such deals, including one that exceeded $1 billion. With $7.3 billion in investments, software deals in the second quarter exceeded total investment across all sectors in 51 of the last 82 quarters.

Challenge.gov, an online portal that facilitates public-sector prize competitions, is celebrating its fifth anniversary later this year. Numerous federal agencies have used prize competitions to spur innovation around areas ranging from water desalination to lung cancer, according to a White House blog post.

Now that many governors have signed spending bills and legislative sessions are drawing to a close, the SSTI Digest will check on the status of proposals related to the innovation economy, and examine the state of technology-based economic development funding in the states. This week, we review spending bills in California, Iowa, Ohio and New Jersey.

Women as business owners may be an underutilized resource for economic development and growth in the state of Wisconsin, according to a recent study from researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW-Madison) – Women Business Leaders Across Wisconsin, 1990-2011. The researchers found that women-owned or managed more than 80,000 Wisconsin-based businesses (nearly 19 percent of all businesses) in 2011.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) announced the winning teams of its first Community College Innovation Challenge (CCIC) – a competition that challenged teams of community college students to propose innovative science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM)-based solutions to real-world problems. The Red Foxes, from Red Rocks Community College (CO), placed first in the challenge with its innovative Mobile Medical Disaster Relief Dispensation Unit.

Although immigrants account for approximately one-fourth of U.S. science and engineering (S&E) employment, there have been relatively few academic studies published that discuss the link between these immigrants, who represent an increasing share of the U.S. workforce, and innovation in the United States. Through a broad investment from the Alfred P.

Now that many governors have signed spending bills and legislative sessions are drawing to a close, the SSTI Digest will check on the status of proposals related to the innovation economy, and examine the state of technology-based economic development funding in the states. This week, we review spending bills in Alaska, Connecticut, Louisiana, South Carolina and Vermont.

With place-based policies for free higher education in place at the local level for years, recent developments have begun to apply these programs on a grander scale. This month, Oregon became the second state to provide free community-college to its citizens, while a team of congressional Democrats introduced a proposal to move forward with President Obama’s plan for free community-college nationally.

Over the past 40 years, the number of women across the globe filing patents has risen fastest within academia compared to all other sectors of the innovation economy, according to a new study from researchers at Indiana University (IU). The researchers found that the overall percentage of patents with women's names attached rose from an average of 2 percent to 3 percent across all areas in 1976 to 18 percent in 2013 for female academics.