awards

The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD), through the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering (OUSD(R&E)), announced awards totaling $15 million for Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) to establish Centers of Excellence (COEs) in Biotechnology and Materials Science. The COEs will provide training to underrepresented students pursuing science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines, and will also provide internships at defense laboratories while also offering training to K-12 students to strengthen the talent pool entering the STEM pipeline.

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has announced that 10 accelerators and incubators across the country have been awarded $9.5 million in total funding through the Energy Program for Innovation Clusters (EPIC) to help develop pipelines for energy technology to reach the market. Created by the DOE’s Office of Technology Transitions, the EPIC funding program aims to encourage the growth of regional energy innovation ecosystems across the U.S. and supports new business formation. This announcement marks the second round of funding through the EPIC program, with the first awarding $500,000 each to 20 incubators and accelerators in October of 2020 to support energy innovation ecosystems and stimulate energy hardware development in regions across the country.

The U.S. Small Business Administration has announced the winners of two award programs. The Lab to Market (L2M) competition was launched in September and recognizes organizations, programs and ideas that support R&D innovation ecosytems, particularly those focused on underrepresented communities and pandemic responses. SBA also announced recipients of the annual Tibbetts Awards, which recognizes companies, organizations, and individuals for exceptional success achieved through the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) programs. SSTI is happy to note that several of our members were recognized in each of the awards.

The Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFI) Fund recently announced the recipients of more than $204 million in FY 2020 funding. Much of the agency’s funding is used to support banking and lending services, but several SSTI members were among the 357 awardees. Launch NY received a financial assistance award and Invest Nebraska and Vermont Sustainable Jobs Fund received technical assistance awards.

The U.S. Small Business Administration announced 24 organizations as recipients of the 2020 Federal and State Technology partnership (FAST) program grant awards. The awards of up to $125,000 focus on “specialized training, mentoring, and technical assistance for R&D-focused small businesses.” The FAST program grants one-year funding to organizations that work to partner with other in-state groups.

The Kauffman Foundation has announced 17 organizations will share the $1.5 million in funding allocated through their Heartland Challenge. These grantees will work to solve specific challenges entrepreneurs in the heartland region — comprised of Missouri, Iowa, Nebraska, and Kansas — face, and will participate in facilitated, peer-learning communities of practice to share knowledge across the region.

The U.S. Small Business Administration has announced the winners of a $1 million competition designed to help makerspaces train the future workforce, focusing on addressing the job skills and placement gap faced by U.S. businesses. The 12 winners of the Makerspace Training, Collaboration and Hiring (MaTCH) Pilot Competition, will reap $1 million total in prize money across three tiers. Seed grants of up to $25,000 will be awarded to seed small workforce development programs, Proof of Principle grants of up to $100,000 will be awarded to grow programs with a proven history of training and/or workforce development, and Scale grants of up to $200,000 will be awarded for capacity building of successful existing programs with a strong history of training and/or workforce development, with graduated participants in at least two training cycles.

Two community colleges in Florida became the winners of the 2019 Aspen Prize for Community College Excellence, which recognizes high achievement and performance among America’s community colleges. Winners were Indian River State College (IRSC) ($350,000) in Fort Pierce, Florida, and Miami Dade College ($350,000) in Miami; Odessa College and Palo Alto College in Texas and Pierce College in Washington were named as Rising Stars ($100,000 each). The $1 million shared prize is awarded every two years and focuses on student success, looking at institutional performance in four areas: student learning; certificate and degree completion; success after graduation in the labor market and in transfer to four-year institutions; and equity in access and success for students of color and low-income students.

A significant majority of SBIR and STTR grants awarded to small businesses from the National Institutes of Health in any given year end up in just a handful of states. For example, the percentage of all 2017 SBIR/STTR awards made to companies in the 23 states and Puerto Rico eligible to participate for funding from NIH’s Institutional Development Award (IDeA) program was only 8 percent – 97 of the 1,218 awards made across all phases of both innovation funding programs.  For comparison, the same states account for 15.8 percent of the estimated U.S. population in 2017. NIH wants to change that discrepancy.