The White House Rural Council has launched a $10 billion rural economic development fund. This launch was announced last Thursday at the Rural Opportunity Investment Conference held in Washington D.C. CoBank, a Denver-based national cooperative bank, serves as the anchor investor of the fund that will be managed by Capitol Peak Asset Management. Capitol will also recruit additional institutional investors to the fund including pension funds, endowments, and foundations that are interested in investing in rural areas.

The Office of Science and Technology Policy announced a public comment period that will assist in the development of an upcoming update of the Strategy for American Innovation. Via a notice of Request for Information (RFI), individuals and organizations have the opportunity to provide input on one or more of nine topic areas:

Recent memoranda issued by the Office of Management and Budget and the Office of Science and Technology policy include the support of lab-to-market technology commercialization as a key pillar of cross-agency spending for the upcoming fiscal year.  The White House instructs agencies to explain how resources are being redirected from low priority efforts to multi-agency collaborations in specific fields, including advanced manufacturing, clean energy, earth observation, global climate change, information technology, life sciences, homeland security and research policy-making.

New partnerships are needed between the IT community, government and institutions of higher learning to help bridge the American skills gap, according to the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST). In a letter to the president, PCAST notes that online solutions could provide people without secondary degrees with the training needed to fill high-demand IT jobs.

The federal government should invest in strategic technologies and multi-agency initiatives to iincrease U.S. advanced manufacturing capabilities, according to a new report from the President’s Council of Advisors in Science and Technology. The Advanced Manufacturing Partnership (AMP) Steering Committee “2.0” is a cross-sector, national effort to secure US leadership in emerging technologies that create high-quality manufacturing jobs and enhance the nation’s competitiveness.

This week, the National Economic Council and Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) released an update to the White House strategy document on fueling the U.S. innovation economy. A Strategy for American Innovation includes a model of the nation’s innovation engine that sheds some light on how the federal government views its role in research and economic growth. For example, digital government initiatives play a key role, alongside investing in basic research, digital infrastructure and STEM education.

As a part of the Obama administration’s Big Data Research and Development Initiative, the National Science Foundation (NSF) announced four awards this week, totaling more than $5 million, to establish four Big Data Regional Innovation Hubs (BD Hubs). The four BD Hubs divide the U.S. into regional collaborations, each focused on different Big Data challenges:

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.

On Wednesday, President Obama launched a new National Strategic Computing Initiative (NSCI) by executive order. The multi-agency effort will seek partnerships with academia and industry to build high-performance computing systems capable of exascale processing and more than 10 times as fast as existing supercomputers.

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.

In a fact sheet released ahead of President Obama’s visit to Macomb Community College in Warren, MI, this week the Obama administration announced new steps to expand apprenticeships and continue other efforts around workforce development and free community college.

Since the establishment of the Tennessee Promise in 2014, the first statewide free community college effort, community college systems and states are outlining their own strategies to make a two-year education free for students in their region in attempt to create an educated, qualified workforce that addresses the needs of industry and promotes economic prosperity. While it may remain too early to judge the benefits and the costs of these programs – lawmakers and educational professionals remain divided on the issue. 

In the days leading up to his final State of the Union Address, President Obama hinted that in lieu of the usual wishlist of policy proposals he would lay out his take on the issues that will define American public life over the next few decades. These issues took the form of four big questions, the first two of which directly relate to the work of tech-based economic development professionals.

This week, President Obama signed off on the continuing resolution omnibus spending package that will keep the federal government open for another nine months (see last week’s analysis).The spending bill provides stable funding for R&D and most research agencies, according to analysis by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

This week, the White House hosted its first Maker Faire where President Obama announced a number of new public-private collaborative efforts to spur U.S. manufacturing entrepreneurship. In order to capitalize on the recent spike in manufacturing entrepreneurship, the administration is enlisting more than 90 mayors and local leaders to make new spaces available for manufacturing and prototyping.

As part of President Obama’s recent executive order on immigration, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) recently issued a number of new policies and regulations intended to capitalize on the skills of foreign workers, researchers and students. The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy published an explanation of how the new rules will also be used to attract immigrant entrepreneurs through two new pathways to legal residency.

Earlier this summer, President Obama announced that his administration would be taking executive action to reform immigration policy, working to improve the entirety of the immigration system by tweaking individual components. This week, at a startup incubator in Los Angeles, the President revealed at least one of those components: the H1B system.

A progress report from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) provides a useful overview of the Obama administration’s ongoing STEM efforts and the roster of STEM initiatives included in the president’s FY15 budget request. Under the proposed budget, federal spending on STEM education would reach $2.9 billion in FY15, a 3.7 percent increase over FY14 funding as enacted.