SSTI Digest

Across the country, there are nearly 6.9 million scientists and engineers, representing 4.8 percent of the nation’s workforce. There are 20 states having at least 100,000 workers in these occupations. Scientists and engineers are concentrated around the nation’s capital, making up the largest share of the workforce in Washington D.C., Maryland, and Virginia. From 2003 to 2017, the number of scientists and engineers grew the fastest in Arkansas, North Dakota, and Utah. With an interactive map and downloadable spreadsheet, this article breaks down the changes in the science and engineering workforce across the United States over the last 15 years.

Despite an uneven economic recovery, fewer Americans are living in distressed communities and more are living in prosperous ones, according to a recent report from the Economic Innovation Group (EIG), a Washington, D.C.-based policy and advocacy organization. Comprised of seven factors measuring socioeconomic health, the Distressed Community Index (DCI) divides the country’s zip codes (communities) into five quintiles — prosperous, comfortable, mid-tier, at-risk, and distressed — and tells the story of the country’s economic health across two time periods, the recession years of 2007 to 2011 and the recovery years of 2012 to 2016. EIG finds that the employment and business establishment growth during the economic recovery has been mostly limited to prosperous communities, where the population tends to be more educated and the housing vacancy rate may be lower.

While women comprise approximately 33 percent of the combined founder and employee workforce at startup companies, they hold just 9 percent of all equity value in those companies, according to The Gap Table from Carta – a software platform for managing startup equity and ownership. The new report was based upon capitalization table (cap table) data from more than 6,000 companies with a combined total of nearly $45 billion in equity value. The cap table is a list of owners of a company and includes information about the percentages of ownership, equity dilution, and value of equity in each round of investment. The researchers found that:

In honor of National Manufacturing day last week, the Trump administration released the Strategy for American Leadership in Advanced Manufacturing. Developed in partnership with the National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) and the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), the report is intended to outline the administration’s vision for American leadership in advanced manufacturing across industrial sectors. It advocates pursuing three goals: develop and transition new manufacturing technologies; educate, train, and connect the manufacturing workforce; and, expand the capabilities of the domestic manufacturing supply chain.

To achieve these goals, the report highlights several action items including:

An evaluation of the One North Carolina Small Business Matching Fund, a statewide initiative providing grants of up to $50,000 to recent SBIR/STTR awardees, suggests that the program is achieving its goals of creating high-skill, high-wage jobs. Over the past 10 funding cycles, the $17.2 million deployed across 250 small businesses has created or retained more than 900 innovation-oriented jobs, and raised an additional $5.6 million in tax revenue for the state, according to the IMPLAN analysis performed by the NC Department of Commerce.

Monday’s widely covered release of a report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) outlining the climate change impacts that could be avoided by limiting  global warming to 1.5°C sounded an alarm bell of scenarios that could ensue if no corrective action is taken. The report includes a summary for policy makers and finds that limiting global warming would require rapid and far-reaching transitions in land, energy, industry and cities. Another report from IPCC released earlier and overshadowed by the global impact report, focuses on specific ways cities around the world could develop a strategic framework to cope with the impacts of climate change. The Cities IPCC report contains input from more than 700 scientists, policy researchers, civic leaders and practitioners from across the planet in a wide range of disciplines, and includes a research and action agenda.

This week we continue our four-part series focused on navigating innovation priorities in a variety of settings. Part 2 focuses on how to create and hone an effective value proposition for your organizations given different audiences, funding sources, public support and the needs of clients. SSTI spoke with Faith Knutsen, director of Social Entrepreneurship and Innovation, Ohio University Voinovich School of Leadership and Public Affairs; and Steve Glynn, director of Innovation, The Water Council.

The series features interviews with experts in the field, each of whom will also be presenting at our annual conference, where these topics will be explored in greater depth. Both presenters featured in this week’s Q&A said their session will be fun, personally and professionally engaging, and highly relevant to each participant’s own sector.  Click here for more information on the conference.

Q:  What do you believe is the role of an effective value proposition for a nonprofit organization?

NVCA and PitchBook released Venture Monitor 3Q 2018 this week. The highlight data point in the report is that total U.S. venture capital investment in 2018 is on pace to break $100 billion for the year — and, in fact, to break $110 billion. At the same time, deal volume is on pace to be at the lowest level since 2012, with just 6,583 deals reported to date in 2018. With so much of the macro VC trends driven by mega deals to the latest-stage companies, we dug into the data at the earliest stages of equity investment: accelerators/incubators, angel, and seed financings.

This month, we begin a four-part series focused on navigating innovation priorities in a variety of settings. The series features perspectives from experts in the field, presented in a Q&A format. Each practitioner we interviewed will also be presenting at our annual conference, where these topics will be explored in greater depth. Click here for more information on the conference.

This week, Part 1 focuses on driving regional innovation with smaller institutions and modest R&D budgets. We heard from Michael Stubblefield, vice chancellor for Research and Strategic Initiatives, Southern University and A&M College; and, Jim Woodell, consultant and former vice president of APLU’s Economic Development and Community Engagement.

Q: What role can universities with smaller research budgets play in regional economic development efforts?

Established in 1979 as a way to help broaden the distribution of federal funds for research and development (R&D), specifically at the National Science Foundation (NSF), one of the most important initiatives funneling research and development funds to states with smaller populations is the Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR). As more attention is paid to the growing inequality between states, programs like EPSCoR are worthy of additional consideration. Although the majority of states have seen their share of federal science and engineering R&D increase as part of the EPSCoR program, the distribution of federal funds for R&D remains very uneven.

The number of workers, students and educators participating in the Manufacturing USA institutes’ portfolio of programs, research projects and training courses grew seven-fold to surpass 191,000 individuals in 2017, according to the network’s new annual report.  With a network of 14 individual institutes supported by the departments of Commerce, Defense and Energy, the Manufacturing USA initiative saw tremendous growth during 2017, including six institutes that went online just during the year.

The program’s value to America’s manufacturers is demonstrated by increases in industry participation, evidenced by 270 applied research projects already underway and a 2:1 matching investment in the network from non-federal sources. Matching contributions already exceed $2 billion. Additionally, membership grew by more than 50 percent to reach 1,291 companies, with almost two thirds being small and mid-sized firms. Highlights and summaries of Manufacturing USA work are available in the full annual report, downloadable here.

The Angel Capital Association is piloting a new report on the factors that influence successful angel investing and the startups that angels support.  The initial Angel Funders Report covers 2017 data from 26 angel groups and provides new insights for one year of investments. Some of the report’s key findings include: