SSTI Digest

As the summer ends and students begin returning to school, the situation for students in the University of Alaska System is uncertain, although less so after recent negotiations between Gov. Mike Dunleavy and University of Alaska (U.A.) System’s administration. Two months ago, the university’s budget experienced a nearly 41 percent reduction in state support for its system triggered by Dunleavy’s FY 2020 state budget vetoes announced just days before the start of the state’s new fiscal year. While the University of Alaska System has been subjected to a number of funding reductions over the last five years, this year’s funding veto – the cutting of $130 million in state support atop the $5 million cuts approved earlier by lawmakers – was the largest.

An early national leader in technology-based economic development (TBED), Pennsylvania now faces several challenges in order to keep up with other states and regions, according to Ideas for Pennsylvania Innovation: Examining Efforts by Competitor States and National Leaders, a new report from the Metropolitan Policy Program at Brookings. It cites the Ben Franklin Technology Partnership as an important early-stage investor and national TBED model and notes that the state “has historically been an innovation leader and Pennsylvania retains a stable of effective, scalable innovation assets.            

State and regional innovation programs continue to encourage significant economic growth across the country. The most recent example of the impact programs are having comes from JumpStart, a Cleveland-based venture development organization, which recently released its 2018 economic impact report. It found that companies in Ohio and New York fostered by JumpStart generated more than $1 billion in economic impact. This increased the cumulative JumpStart total to $6.6 billion since 2010.

Want that kind of economic impact in your region? Attendees of the upcoming SSTI Annual Conference in Providence, Rhode Island, Sept. 9 – 11 will learn lessons learned from programs that are creating a better future through science, technology and innovation and leave the conference with actionable ideas to improve their states and regions.

In response to its shrinking industrial base and having identified a gap in its ability to rapidly acquire and deploy innovative technologies, the U.S. Air Force (USAF) recently made some changes to its SBIR/STTR program. The new Pitch Days have already met with success and 10 more Pitch Days have been scheduled in 2019. The USAF expects to make its roughly $660 million of annual SBIR/STTR funding more easily available to a greater number of startup companies, thereby greatly expanding its industrial base, encouraging innovation and small business generation, and filling the innovation void left by the large prime contractors.

A recent report from global management consulting firm A.T. Kearney calls into doubt the ability of U.S. trade policy in encouraging domestic manufacturing firms to reshore their production efforts. Following the government’s release of 2018 trade data, A.T. Kearney published the findings from its sixth annual Reshoring Index, which compares year-over-year changes in U.S. manufacturing gross output to imports of manufactured goods from 14 traditionally low-cost country (LCC) trading partners in Asia. It found that imports rose by 9 percent for the year while U.S. gross manufacturing output grew only 6 percent in the same period. Combined with the Foreign Derived Intangible Income (FDII) tax deduction created by the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, the Trump Administration argued that manufacturing would be driven back to the U.S. by tariffs on imports. Despite the government’s stated intent of bringing back manufacturing jobs, its trade policies appear to be showing different results.

The Angel Resource Institute has released its latest analysis of 2018 angel investing. Characterizing the full year of investments captured in the annual survey – more than 2,500 individual transactions – the report profiles activity by several different factors useful in understanding regional differences in the early stage financing community. It should be noted, however, that adjustments in the deal size ceiling for inclusion in the analysis for 2018, to reflect the degree to which angels are participating in next-stage rounds (Series A), make comparisons to previous years less meaningful.  

There are still many interesting data points profiling the regions in a manner to reflect industry sector preferences, deal structures, valuation and investment sizes, type of investment (new v. follow-on), investment geographic stickiness, and CEO gender and ethnicity by stage of deal.  Some examples:

A new scorecard from the nonprofit American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE) reveals that while U.S. cities are ramping up their clean energy efforts, most cities with climate goals are either not on track to achieve them or are not yet tracking progress. The 2019 City Clean Energy Scorecard ranks 75 cities on more than 50 metrics and this year for the first time, includes policy efforts to advance renewable energy in addition to energy efficiency. Boston retains its first-place ranking, followed by San Francisco, Seattle and Minneapolis. Three cities, including Providence, Rhode Island, this year’s location for SSTI’s Annual Conference, were also named as Cities to Watch. Providence was deemed a city to watch in part because of its adoption of several major clean energy policies and programs, as well as its commitment to engage low-income communities and communities of color in its environmental process.

The number of women-owned business has increased significantly in recent years, but more needs to be done to level the playing field to increase the revenue and employee counts of these businesses, according to two recent studies. More venture capital is needed, as well as mentoring, training and opportunities for women of color.

Women owned 12.3 million businesses in 2018, more than 30 times the 1972 total of 402,000, according to the American Express 2018 State of Women-Owned Business Report. Women now run about 40 percent of all U.S. businesses. Much of this increase has been led by women of color, who now own about 47 percent of all women-owned businesses.

More borrowers are utilizing the rapidly growing fintech lending industry to garner record numbers of unsecured personal loans.  American have “sharply increased their use of unsecured personal loans because of the growing presence of fintech lenders,” according to a new report from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.

The total of unsecured personal loans leapt to $138 billion by the end of 2018, an increase of $21 billion from the previous year. The total reached $143 billion by the end of the first quarter of this year and is estimated to rise to an all-time high of $156 billion by the end of 2019, according to the Federal Reserve of St. Louis.

Of the $138 billion total at the end of 2018, 38 percent was issued by fintech firms. This is a seven-fold increase from the 5 percent of unsecured personal loans issued by fintech firms in 2013.

The U.S. Economic Development Administration (EDA) announced Regional Innovation Strategies awards — i6 Challenge and Seed Fund Support — to 44 organizations. Those awards are worth $23.5 million in federal funding matched by $26 million from a variety of private and public sector sources for nearly $50 million for projects to support entrepreneurship and innovation in 28 states and two territories. SSTI members receiving awards include BioSTL, Launch Tennessee, Epicenter Memphis, Research Foundation of SUNY, and VertueLab.  

These new awardees will be working to expand on the RIS program’s already-impressive impacts. These include more than 4,000 companies assisted, supporting the launch of 1,600 new products and $19 million invested in companies, per EDA.

Ten states from across the country have been selected as part of a unique program designed to grow and strengthen their manufacturers. Over the course of the next year, interdisciplinary state teams will meet together in Washington, D.C., and separately in their home states, to develop and refine strategies impacting manufacturing industries.

Based on their specific needs and goals, participating states developed working teams with representatives from areas such as the private sector, governor’s offices, state workforce and economic development departments, Manufacturing Extension Partnership centers, and manufacturing trade associations, among others. The participating states are: Arizona, Colorado, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Missouri, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Vermont, and Wisconsin.

With the Census Bureau’s July 17 release of the 2019 2nd Quarter update, the bureau’s Business Formation Statistics (BFS) changed format. Originally developed as an experimental research project in the bureau’s Center for Economic Studies in February 2018, the BFS has been redesigned as a formal release, complete with interactive data selection and visualization tools, and relocated with the bureau’s other regularly released economic indicators.