In the February 12, 2007 Issue:

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Gov. Rendell Unveils $850M Clean Energy Fund
Earlier this month Pennsylvania Gov. Edward Rendell announced a broad state strategy to improve the state’s energy independence, support alternative energy business, and reduce the state’s environmental impact. The key element of the new state plan is an $850 million Energy Independence Fund, designed to reduce energy costs for consumers and shift the state’s usage toward clean and renewable sources. Gov. Rendell hopes the plan will save Pennsylvania consumers $10 billion over the next 10 years by lowering energy costs and reducing consumption.
 
The governor’s Energy Independence Fund will support the development and adoption of clean energy technologies across the state and in consumer households. Activities supported by the fund include:

Clean energy entrepreneurs and businesses in the state will receive new support through the fund’s venture investments. A $56 million Energy Independence Greenhouse, administered by the Ben Franklin Technology Development Authority, will fund translational research, entrepreneurial training, start-up incubation, and early-stage funding for alternative energy companies. The state also will provide $50 million to venture capital partnerships that invest in the Pennsylvania energy industry. Companies, nonprofit organizations, and local governments will be able to apply for grants and loans through the Pennsylvania Energy Development Agency for energy-related economic development projects, solar manufacturing, waste coals, biofuels, energy conservation and efficiency, and other energy management projects.
 
This support will complement investments made by the state Treasury Department’s $40 million Keystone Green Fund, announced last year (see the Oct. 23, 2006 issue of the SSTI Weekly Digest). The Keystone Fund will provide private equity and debt investments, venture capital placements, and project financing for projects related to alternative power sources.
 
Consumers would directly benefit through several of the new programs. The PA Sunshine program would boost solar energy use in the state by covering up to 50 percent of the cost of installing solar panels on residences or small businesses. Under the governor’s plan, consumers also would be given new tools to reduce their energy costs and to take control over the types of electric power they receive. Consumers will have the right to have smart meters installed in their home, which provide more detail about their electricity use. Any power company seeking to build new plants would first have to prove that it has actively made this tool available to its customers.
 
The plan would strengthen the state’s renewable fuels standard to require that every gallon of gasoline sold in the state contain at least 10 percent ethanol. Gov. Rendell also has announced that within the next 90 days he will unveil a state plan to combat global climate change.
 
Read the press release at: http://www.state.pa.us/papower/cwp/view.asp?A=11&Q=459791

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BP Awards $500M for Biofuel Research
Energy giant BP has announced that the University of California at Berkeley, in partnership with the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, will receive a total of $500 million to host a research center dedicated to developing biofuel technologies. The Energy Biosciences Institute (EBI) will conduct both basic and applied biological research relevant to energy. BP and the university plan to launch research programs this summer.
 
UC Berkeley was one of five universities around the world invited to apply when BP announced last July that that the company would dedicate $500 million over the next 10 years to a biofuels research facility. Other applicants included UC San Diego, UIUC, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge University, and Imperial College London. To improve the bid from the California universities, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's proposed budget for fiscal year 2008 includes $40 million in lease revenue to support the research center if either of the two California institutions won. The state also plans to contribute $70 million to build a headquarters for the institute, which will temporarily be housed within existing buildings on campus.
 
Researchers initially will focus on developing renewable fuels for automobiles. This work will incorporate many areas of research and will include creating new biofuel components and enhancing the efficiency of fuel blends, improving the existing technologies that convert organic matter into biofuels, and developing new plant species that produce a higher fuel yield. Later investigations will address the conversion of heavy hydrocarbons to clean fuels, improved recovery from existing oil and gas reservoirs, and carbon sequestration. Much of the research produced by the institute will be commercialized through BP Alternative Energy, an offshoot of the corporation launched in 2005. In addition, up to 50 BP personnel will be placed on the campuses to carry out the work of the institute.
 
UC Berkeley will host the majority of EBI’s 25 teams of researchers. BP Group CEO John Browne explained that UC Berkeley was chosen because of its strong track record of "big science,” or long-term research involving multiple teams of researchers across many disciplines. The university plans to house EBI in the same building as other ongoing energy research projects to encourage cross-disciplinary thinking.

In addition to biology and energy research, the initiative also will involve the social sciences and include a "social interactions and risks laboratory" to examine the role of the public in determining the path of energy policy and technological development, the public policy implications of genetically modified organic sources of energy, and the dissemination of knowledge about alternative energy.
 
Both UIUC and Berkley National Laboratory will receive additional BP funding and personnel to support research through the new institute. UIUC, which has thousands of available acres for cultivating plant matter for bioenergy, will act as a secondary site for research. UIUC plans to dedicate 340 acres of farmland to EBI research this year. Berkeley National Laboratory will expand its current alternative energy program to mesh with EBI and provide access to existing facilities and data. EBI activities also are expected to dovetail with the carbon neutral energy research conducted through Helios project at Berkeley Labs, which will receive $30 million from the state in FY 2008 and additional support from the U.S. Department of Energy.
 
Find out more about the Energy Biosciences Institute at: http://www.bp.com/sectiongenericarticle.do?categoryId=9009836&contentId=7018600

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Recent Research
SBA: New Businesses Have Greatest Impact on Economic Growth
A recent study completed for the Small Business Administration (SBA) concludes that small business establishment births are the single-largest determinant of the growth rate of gross state product (GSP), state personal income, and total state employment using data from the years 1988-2002. The authors contend state efforts to promote the creation of small businesses will generate more economic growth then any other policy option included in their models. They calculated that increasing small business births by 5 percent increased the growth of the gross state product by 0.47 percent. These same conclusions would have been reached if small businesses were defined as having less than 500 employees or less than 100 employees, the study indicates.
 
The authors believe that while a large amount of research has been performed relating small businesses to economic growth at a national or international level, little is known when the state is the unit of analysis. Combining information from the U.S. Census Bureau’s Statistics of U.S. Businesses with data from the Center for Business and Economic Research at the University of Tennessee, panel data was created for all 50 states over a period of 15 years.
 
In the desire to isolate the impact of small business data such as the number of small business firms within the state, the number of physical locations with less than 500 employees, small firm employment and payroll levels, and small firm establishment births and deaths, other variables were attempted to be used as control variables. Among others, these included: percentage of population with at least a bachelor’s degree; index of energy prices; wage rates; unemployment rates; age distribution of the population; share of manufacturing within the state’s economy; the state’s sales tax rates; corporate tax rates; and, the number of tax and non-tax incentive programs for economic development.
 
One of the relationships found in the model was that the number of small firm establishments and the value of small business payroll in adjacent states both have positive but small effects on in-state GSP growth. Perhaps, “a rising tide of small business growth lifts all boats,” as opposed to the thought that small business activity is a zero-sum game and adjacent states need to compete against each other in acquiring them.
 
The study, Small Business and State Growth: An Econometric Investigation, is available at http://www.sba.gov/advo/research/rs292tot.pdf.

Links to this report and more than 4,500 additional TBED-related research reports, strategic plans and other papers can be found at the Tech-based Economic Development (TBED) Resource Center, jointly developed by the Technology Administration and SSTI, at http://www.tbedresourcecenter.org/.

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Top Countries Shuffle Spots for Most Patents
Rapid growth in the number of international patents filed by northeast Asian nations during 2006 has resulted in a shift of positions for the top-performing nations, according to the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). With 34.1 percent, the U.S. maintained its global dominance with 49,555 patent filings. The figure represents an increase of 6.1 percent over America’s 2005 total; the U.S. rate of growth is slower than the 6.4 percent growth in total world filings.
 
Japan, maintaining its second place position, filed 26,906 patent applications, 18.5 percent of the global total of 145,300. Germany remained in third with 11.7 percent of the total.
 
Changes to the remaining rankings in the top 10 reflect the rapid growth of patent activity in Korea and China. The Republic of Korea, which experienced 26.6 percent growth in 2006 over the prior year, overtook the United Kingdom and France to become the fourth-biggest country of origin of filings, and applicants from China, whose use grew by 56.8 percent, dislodged Switzerland and Sweden to take the position of eighth-largest country of origin. The number of patent filings in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands for 2006 decreased from figures reported in 2005.
 
The top five applicant companies remain unchanged. The Dutch multinational Philips Electronics N.V. was again the largest applicant (2,495 applications published in 2006), followed by Matsushita (Japan, 2,344), Siemens (Germany, 1,480), Nokia (Finland, 1,036), and Bosch (Germany, 962). These were followed by 3M (U.S., 727), BASF (Germany, 714), Toyota (Japan, 704), Intel (U.S., 690), and Motorola (U.S., 637). Among the 20 top filing companies, seven were from the U.S., four from Japan and three from Germany.
 
Several companies join the top 20 list, including Huawei (China), up 24 places to 13th, Fujitsu (Japan), up 9 places to 15th, LG Electronics (Republic of Korea) up 12 to 16th, and Hewlett-Packard (U.S.) up five to 18th.
 
More information, including the breakdown by technology sector, is available on the WIPO website: http://www.wipo.int/edocs/prdocs/en/2007/wipo_pr_2007_476.html

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Knight Foundation Funds Creative Community Initiative
The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, in partnership with the Richard Florida Creativity Group (RFCG), recently announced the formation of the Knight Creative Communities Initiative in three metropolitan areas of the country: Charlotte; Duluth, Minn./Superior, Wisc.; and, Tallahassee. The goal of the initiative, utilizing Dr. Florida’s theories on the importance of creativity and innovation for economic growth, is to produce through community dialogue a vision to enhance each region’s environment for ingenuity.
 
With the assistance of local foundations and organizations, the initiative in each of the communities will be spearheaded by a local host committee of civic leaders who will then solicit the opinions of a diverse set of 30 emerging leaders and volunteers to identify the distinct assets of the community. These “territory assets,” along with a region’s capacity for talent, tolerance and technology form the “4T’s” - which Dr. Florida often refers to in his writings. After these 30 volunteers are provided with training, data and support, they will begin work on the creation of a community vision and set of initiatives to promote economic growth.
 
These pilot projects will enable the theories of Dr. Florida, under the direction of his consulting team, to be utilized in the future strategy of these three regions.
 
More information is available at: http://www.knightfdn.org/default.asp?story=cpp/index.asp

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Useful Stats
NIH Awards by State, FY 2001-05
Increasing federal funding for life science research is one of the most significant ingredients for improving a state’s position in building a strong biotech and biomedical sector. As appropriations for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) were increasing annually – as they did in the last half of the 1990s and the first few years of this decade – this was not a zero-sum game. All states could win.
 
That is less likely to be the case if increases in NIH appropriations barely keep pace with inflation as Congress and the Administration shift research priorities toward other areas of science and engineering.
 
So how did everyone do during times of plenty? To answer this, SSTI has compiled a table of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) awards in total dollars and state rankings from fiscal years 2001-05. The states, ranked by percent change over the five-year period, show South Dakota (132.28), Louisiana (115.52), Montana (113.13), Indiana (96.61) and North Dakota (96.60) posted the greatest gains.
 
Those posting the top five largest dollar amounts in FY 2005 - California, Massachusetts, New York, Maryland, and Pennsylvania - remained unchanged from FY 2004. Overall, total NIH awards grew by 38.39 percent over the five-year period. Every state, including the District of Columbia exhibited an increase of total dollars except Wyoming, which incurred a $1.23 million decrease.

SSTI's table is available at: http://www.ssti.org/Digest/Tables/021207t.htm
 
NIH awards and statistics are available at: http://grants.nih.gov/grants/award/awardtr.htm

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SSTI Job Corner
Complete descriptions of the position openings described below are available at http://www.ssti.org/posting.htm.

The Allegheny Conference on Community Development, a nonprofit organization dedicated to providing private sector leadership to grow the economy and improve the quality of life in the 10-county Pittsburgh region, is seeking a senior vice president for its Workforce Quality Program. This position represents an opportunity to work at the highest levels of corporate, government and community leadership to ensure the Pittsburgh region develops a skilled workforce of sufficient size and quality to satisfy the needs of businesses. A postgraduate degree and 10-plus years of relevant experience are required.

The Oregon Economic and Community Development Department (OECDD) is recruiting highly qualified individuals to fill the position of economist with its Innovation and Economic Strategies Division. The mission of OECDD is to prepare communities and support business to advance Oregon’s economy. A few responsibilities include interpreting economic data and recommending strategies to top agency management, the Governor’s Office, legislators and their staff, and business leaders in the state. Applicants must have a master’s degree in economics or a related field and four years of experience doing economic research or econometric forecasting; or a Ph.D. in economics or a related field and one-year of experience doing economic research.

RTI International, an organization that conducts innovative, multidisciplinary research to improve the human condition, is looking for someone to serve as a senior research economic development specialist. This position will lead the growth of RTI's consulting and research services in strategies for technology-based economic development, industry cluster studies, and best practices in technology transfer and commercialization. An advanced degree, preferably a Ph.D., in science, engineering, public policy, economic development, or planning and public administration is required.

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People
With new governors often come changes in the leadership of state economic development organizations. Arkansas, Colorado and Maryland recently announced their new development officers:

Catherine Renault is the new director for the Maine Office of Innovation within the state’s Department of Economic and Community Development.
 
Jim Rice, with the Information Technology Association of Wisconsin, announced his departure as the organization’s first president.

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