The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has issued a Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO) seeking proposals to establish and operate a CHIPS Manufacturing USA institute focused on digital twins for the semiconductor industry. The CHIPS for America Program anticipates up to approximately $285 million in funding will be awarded to the institute. Digital twins, as defined in a press release from the U.S. Department of Commerce, are “virtual models that mimic the structure, context, and behavior of a physical counterpart.”

AlphaLab Health, an accelerator program developed by Innovation Works (IW) and Allegheny Health Network (AHN) for life-sciences startups in the Pittsburgh region, has received a $10 million grant from an anonymous donor. The grant establishes the AlphaLab Health Revolving Investment Fund, which will support startups in the accelerator program. According to a press release from AlphaLab Health, the investment returns generated by the fund will create a “permanent, self-sustaining source of revenue that will be reinvested into future AlphaLab startups.” 

New House appropriations committee chair Tom Cole (R-OK) has announced a rule that nonprofits are not eligible for “community project funding” (i.e., earmarks) from the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Economic Development Initiative in the FY 2025 appropriations bill. In FY 2024, this account provided $3.3 billion to public and nonprofit organizations, and CQ Roll Call reports that nearly $800 million of the House’s projects went to nonprofits. The rules for FY 2025 also maintain the ban Cole’s predecessor, Rep. Kay Granger (R-TX), placed on all earmarks in the Labor-Health and Human Services-Education funding bill. At this point, the Senate does not seem likely to conform with the House’s change—the Senate has not published a change to its guidance and did not follow the House’s restrictions in FY 2024.

While the growth of female-founded and co-founded companies has increased at a faster rate than those of male-founded and co-founded and mixed gender founded companies, it is still a smaller amount than the other two. Additionally, these companies are more likely to receive a higher proportion of deals occurring earlier in the VC pipeline.

In the 21st century, some high-tech firms in emerging fields are valued more for their perceived innovation potential than by traditional measures of a successful business. But how does innovation influence the value of existing publicly traded firms? New research by Panteleimon Kruglov and Charles Shaw explores the relationship between R&D intensity and financial performance among S&P 500 companies over 100 quarters from 1998 to 2023 and its implications for firm competitiveness and market positioning.

The measurements for success of female-founded and female-co-founded companies, while improving, remain lower than male-founded companies in number, deal count, and capital invested, according to PitchBook’s 2023 Annual US VC Valuations Report. PitchBook found that female-only-founded startups received just 2% of all venture capital (VC) dollars in 2023, while those female-co-founded reached 21% that year—a record high. SSTI analysis of PitchBook data finds that the number of VC deals to female-founded and female-cofounded companies has increased 58% over the past decade, yet despite reaching that milestone, they have been on a sharp downward trend since 2021.

“Inclusive clusters have an explicit focus on equity, have identified the precise issues that lead to economic disparities in the cluster and have targeted strategies in place to shrink those disparities,” say the authors of Developing Inclusive Clusters, a recent Insight Report from the New Growth Innovation Network (NGIN) and RTI International. They cite the high-tech industry as a high-wage industry whose benefits “tend to exclude women, people of color, and non-urban communities” and note that this type of disparity has not been “widely or systematically” studied.