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The Chicago-based MacArthur Foundation, best known for its “genius grant” fellowships that finance creative endeavors, announced on June 2 a new grant competition called “100&Change.” The $100 million grant will be awarded to a single proposal that contributes to “solving society’s most pressing problems.”  Unlike other competitions, such as XPRIZE moonshots, the foundation is not defining what societal challenge or issue it wants to address, but instead it has purposefully created 100&Change to challenge the notion that foundation gran

The American Academy of Arts and Sciences is continuing their campaign to add supporters to Innovation: An American Imperative. The initiative calls on Congress to take several actions, including to: a) increase basic research funding, b) increase funding for STEM programs, c) reform U.S.

In the lead-up to the Biotechnology Innovation Organization’s (BIO) International Convention held this week, the organization released a series of reports on the health of the industry. Collectively, the reports indicate that the bioscience industry is seeing greater employment with better wages, increasing venture investment, but university and federal funding, patent filings and clinical trial success are leveling off or decreasing.

Despite increasing demand for life sciences research funding and larger budgets from Congress, access to the investigator research funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is getting harder, according to data released May 31 by Michael Lauer, NIH deputy director for Extramural Research.  R01 grants, the oldest and predominant funding mechanism NIH uses to distribute project-specific research grants, are becoming larger in size and more exclusive in who receives the grants.

While the recent Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS) has some economists concerned that the U.S. economy is running out of qualified workers to fill existing openings, several states have announced workforce programs that are intended to address the skills-gap and build the talent pipeline in their respective states.

Ten Connecticut startups competed in a $10,000 pitch competition at CTNext last week, but the five-year-old state initiative finds itself the winner of a much higher-stakes appraisal. Gov. Dannel Malloy approved the FY 2017 state budget bill on June 2, which will make CTNext an independent organization with $67 million in bonding support.

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SSTI has released the online version of the 2016 SSTI Excellence in TBED Awards Program. Available at sstiawards.org, the online version of the awards brochure will highlight changes to the awards program including the categories for 2016:

As the 2015-2016 academic calendar comes to an end, several universities announced large financial contributions from foundations to address large societal issues including cancer and a variety of neurological disorders.  These large-scale initiatives will be undertaken at universities in California, Indiana, New York, Pennsylvania, and Texas.

In an effort to prepare students for post-secondary education that meets the needs of key state industries, Iowa Gov. Terry Brandstad signed HF 2392 into law on May 26. The new law will attempt to modernize Iowa’s career technical education system as well as increase the number of Iowans with a post-secondary education by helping eighth-grade students develop career and academic plans with an emphasis on work-based training; establishing regional partnerships to help schools provide career technical education; and, expanding career technical education to include new areas in key state industries.

The Delta Regional Authority  (DRA) released the Regional Development Plan III (RDPIII) – an economic development strategy to help guide DRA’s 252-county region’s economic growth over the next five years. In RDPIII, DRA identifies three goals and related action items to guide its economic development efforts in the Delta region:

Newly released research from the Kauffman Foundation finds that in 2016, Washington, D.C., Austin, San Jose, Columbus, and Nashville were the five highest ranked metropolitan areas for the Index of Growth Entrepreneurship. The five highest ranked states were Virginia, Utah, Maryland, Arizona, and Massachusetts.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) released a federal funding opportunity (FFO) to establish and sustain up to eight Regional Alliances and Multistakeholder Partnerships to Stimulate (RAMPS) Cybersecurity Education and Workforce Development.

After over four years of “anxious waiting,” equity crowdfunding is now legal across the U.S. allowing non-accredited investors to make equity investment in startups through a registered online portal. With the adoption of the final rules for Title III of the Jumpstart Our Business Startups (JOBS) Act, the U.S.

Although the growth of young entrepreneurial businesses has increased it has not yet returned to pre-Recession levels, according to new research from the Kauffman Foundation. The Kauffman Index of Growth Entrepreneurship measures the growth of entrepreneurial businesses in the United States. In 2016, the index experienced the largest year-over-year increase in the last decade, according to its authors, Kauffman researchers Arnobio Morelix, E.J. Reedy, and Joshua Russell. Despite this uptick, however, entrepreneurial growth is still down compared to the levels experienced in the 1980s and 1990s.

The Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE) released a notice of intent to establish and sustain a Clean Energy
Manufacturing Innovation Institute for Reducing Embodied-Energy and Decreasing Emissions (REMADE) in materials manufacturing. The $70 million funding opportunity
will be released in June to enable the development and widespread deployment of key industrial platform technologies that will dramatically reduce life-cycle

As the National Science Foundation (NSF) celebrates its 66th birthday, NSF’s Director France Córdova unveiled a nine-point research agenda to shape the federal agency’s future for the next several decades. These nine big ideas are intended to “illustrate how increased support for the type of basic research that NSF funds could help answer pressing societal problems,” according to an article from sciencemag.org. NSF’s leadership also hopes to build public and subsequent federal government support for significant federal investments in its agenda as well as spark the interest of industry and foundations to invest alongside the federal government. In addition to NSF’s release of a proposed long-term research agenda, two reports focused on Big Data and advanced computing infrastructures were also released by the federal government in May.

Although many leaders of high-tech incubator and accelerator programs do not currently offer targeted programs to ensure inclusivity of all populations, they have conveyed they would like to do so, according to new research from the Initiative for the Competitive Inner City (ICIC), with financial support from JP Morgan Chase. The research brief, which was unveiled this week as part of Detroit’s Startup Week, draws on interviews with more than 75 entrepreneurship, incubator and accelerator program managers to identify barriers to inclusivity and present potential strategies that could increase the participation rates of women and minority entrepreneurs.

One of the recurring characteristics of entrepreneurs, based on numerous biographies and case studies, is a driven self-confidence that may border, in some circles, as excessive or even narcissistic. Closer scrutiny, of course, shows there is no such thing as the “self-made” person, but entrepreneurship still is described often as a heroic, lone-wolf quest. Is it paradoxical to advocate for and even expect mentoring and “how to” entrepreneurship training to work? Wouldn’t “real” entrepreneurs leading promising startups succeed without the advice? A recent working paper describes an experiment that attempted to address this issue.

SSTI is excited to announce the 2016 SSTI Excellence in TBED awards program. For the last nine years, SSTI has recognized initiatives that greatly impact state and regional economies a national competition showcasing effective and innovative approaches to building tech-based economies. To mark the program’s 10th anniversary, we will be announcing several changes to the program the next couple weeks – so stay tuned!

In this week’s Digest, we wanted to highlight several of the key dates for the 2016 competition:

In Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game — a New York Times bestseller by Michael Lewis from 2003 – the author focuses on the successful approach of Major League Baseball’s (MLB) Oakland Athletics and its general manager Billy Beane’s use of an analytical, evidence-based, sabermetric approach to assemble a competitive baseball team. Conventional wisdom of the time focused on traditional scouting and non-advanced statistics.

Because they focus on attracting mature firms through relocation incentives, job creation strategies at the state level are often misguided, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Despite this, many metropolitan regions are increasingly focusing their efforts on attracting and retaining the high-growth firms responsible for an oversized share of job growth and economic output. While considerable research has focused on the important role that startups and high-growth firms play in the national economy, relatively little has been done to apply a regional lens to this phenomenon. New research, tracks high-growth firms over a multiple-year period to assess how their changing operations can inform regional economic development.