SSTI Digest

The Blackstone Charitable Foundation has announced its first cohort of eight organizations in the Chicago-area entrepreneurship challenge. Named the BX Challenge, up to $3 million in grant funding will be provided over three years to innovative organizations that effectively recruit and support diverse entrepreneurs and scale startups in the Chicago area. The selected programs will serve underserved populations, including communities of color, women, veterans, and immigrants. The inaugural cohort includes SSTI member UI Labs, which was awarded $100,000 to create a partnership between City Digital and Colony 5 to help community based start-ups tackle urban challenges and explore ideas on smart city developments through entrepreneurship. Other inaugural cohort awardees include:

While much recent attention has been given to the Cancer Moonshot research effort, the National Cancer Institute established a network of publicly funded cancer cooperative research groups more than 50 years ago to evaluate new treatments for efficacy and safety. JAMA Oncology details an investigation that examined the extent to which positive NCI-sponsored cancer treatment trials have benefitted patients with cancer. The study estimated that 3.34 million life-years were gained in the population of U.S. patients with cancer through 2015, at a cost of $125 per life-year gained. Twenty-three treatment trials were identified as providing a statistically significant improvement in overall survival from new, experimental therapies developed from 1956-2016. 

By its very nature, economic dynamism can unsettle local economies. As businesses dissolve, jobs are lost. Technological shifts can drastically alter – or even replace – companies, occupations and entire industries. As these ripple effects move throughout communities, it is easy to focus on the negative impacts, but this loses sight of the importance dynamism has on national economic health. Recent research highlights the significance of dynamism to individual, state, and national economic well-being, as well as a potential paradox: while many Americans are concerned with too much economic dynamism, research shows that the nation needs more of it, not less.

Two recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions will greatly shape patent holder rights by limiting where patent lawsuits can be filed and restricting patent rights after a product is sold. These rulings are considered by many analysts to be beneficial for startups, small businesses, and consumers. The biggest losers will be patent trolls – patent owners who collect IP rights only to seek infringement damages – who likely will face more pushback against their patent lawsuits and may see fewer settlements.

More than 46 million Americans, nearly 15 percent of the population, lived in poverty in 2015, according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s Small Area Income and Poverty Estimates. Compared against census data for 1999, more than 2,500 of the country’s 3,100-plus counties saw their rate increase. In 2015, 753 counties had a poverty rate of at least 20 percent — and 415 of these counties have been above this threshold in census data dating back to at least 1989. These “persistent poverty” counties are targets for set asides of some federal economic development funding.

In the FY 2017 omnibus, Congress encouraged four agencies — USDA Rural Development, CDFI Fund, EPA’s Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act (CERCLA), and EDA — to spend at least 10 percent of appropriated funds in “persistent poverty” counties.[1] Congress defines persistent poverty as at least 20 percent of the county population living in poverty over the past 30 years.

While U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue has announced that the Rural Development agency would be elevated under a reorganization plan because it would be placed under the direct oversight of the Secretary, not everyone is viewing the consolidation as an elevation. The reorganization plan details efforts to “improve the effectiveness of USDA efforts” and includes plans to realign the Farm Service Agency, the Risk Management Agency, and the Natural Resources Conservation Service under a newly created Under Secretary for Farm Production and Conservation. While the report states that the reorganization will elevate Rural Development (RD), in the process it loses its own undersecretary. The USDA Office of Communications, in response to an SSTI request for clarification of the change, responded: “The agencies contained within Rural Development will remain as currently constituted and be led by the Assistant to the Secretary, who will have rural prosperity as a sole focus.

If it takes a village to raise a child, it may take an entire educational support system as well as public policy reform and funding to get that child into a skilled technical job. A two-year study coordinated by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine found that the disjointed method of workforce development approaches in the U.S. may be hampering the economic competitiveness of the country. To combat that disjointed approach, the study, Building America’s Skilled Technical Workforce, makes a series of recommendations for policy makers, educators, employers, and other stakeholders in the future development of a skilled technical workforce.

In an effort to incentivize large-scale industry partnerships, Innovation, Science and Economic Development (ISED) Canada will invest up to C$950 million (US$708.5 million) between 2017 and 2022 in superclusters as part of the nation’s Innovation and Skills Plan.

The Kauffman Foundation’s recently updated Index of Startup Activity finds that startup activity has increased for the third consecutive year and has now reached pre-recession levels. Nationally, the index, which measures business startup activity from 1997 to 2016, increased moderately after two years of sharp growth. Interactive data is available at both the state and metropolitan level. Among the 25 largest states, California, Texas, Florida, Arizona and Colorado, had the highest startup activity in 2017, while Oklahoma, Wyoming, Alaska, Montana and Nevada led among the 25 smaller states. Miami, Austin, Los Angeles, San Diego and Las Vegas were the metropolitan areas with the highest startup activity.

Now in its third year, the index is comprised of three equally weighted proxies:

In Part 1 of this two-part series, SSTI examined NIH’s proposed changes that will place limits on individual researcher funding. In Part 2, impacts of the limits are explored.

The president’s budget for FY 2018 would eliminate funding for numerous innovation programs, slash spending on R&D and technology transfer and limit education and training opportunities. The full budget proposal may well be “dead on arrival” in Congress, but this is not the same as Congress rejecting each budget proposal. These cuts threaten America’s long-term economic, medical and security interests — described by WIRED as “science insurance” — but cuts to Medicaid and Meals-on-Wheels will continue to receive the bulk of national attention. If federal spending for science, technology, innovation and entrepreneurship is to remain a national priority, the best — and likely, only — advocates will be the practitioners, researchers, investors and entrepreneurs who experience these initiatives on a daily basis. In short: you.

Unless otherwise noted, all FY 2018 figures are from the department’s budget justification, and all FY 2017 figures are from committee reports for the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2017.

The president’s FY 2018 request for discretionary budget authority to fund programs and operating expenses is $21.0 billion, approximately $4.8 billion below the 2017 estimate in discretionary program funding for the Department of Agriculture (USDA). This includes funding for Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC), Rural Development, Forest Service, food safety, research, and conservation activities. However, the budget does not include the USDA reorganization plan that was announced by Secretary Sonny Perdue on May 11, which proposes a change in status for Rural Development.

Research, Education, and Economics