SSTI Digest

The Manufacturing Extension Partnership (MEP) released federal funding opportunity award competitions for the operation of MEP state centers. States up for competition include Colorado, Connecticut, Indiana, Michigan, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Oregon, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia. The objective of the MEP Center Program is to provide business and technical services to small- and medium-sized manufacturers within the state of operation. MEP anticipates funding 10 MEP Center awards, each with an initial five-year funding commitment. MEP will hold an information webinar on August 21 at 2:00 P.M. EDT for organizations that are considering applying for awards. Applications are due October 15. Visit the MEP State Competition website…

The Office of Science and Technology Policy announced a public comment period that will assist in the development of an upcoming update of the Strategy for American Innovation. Via a notice of Request for Information (RFI), individuals and organizations have the opportunity to provide input on one or more of nine topic areas:

• Overarching questions;
• Innovation trends;
• Science, technology, and R&D priorities;
• Skilled workforce development;
• Manufacturing and entrepreneurship;
• Regional innovation ecosystems;
• Intellectual property/antitrust;
• Novel government tools for promoting innovation; and,
• National priorities.

Comments are due by September 23. Read the RFI….

Driven by large-scale efforts like the U.S. government-funded Human Genome Project, genomic medicine has gone from an aspirational term only 10 years ago to a rapidly growing, cutting-edge industry that is starting to produce economic benefits for regions, both domestically and abroad. To benefit from this rapidly growing trend, policymakers in New York and Canada recently announced significant funding to support genomic medicine initiatives.

New York
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced approximately $105 million in funding has been approved to establish the Genomic Medicine and Big Data Center (GMBDC), a public-private  partnership to support research collaboration between the University at Buffalo and the New York Genome Center. GMBDC will link supercomputing capacity at the University at Buffalo (UB) and medical researchers at Roswell Park Cancer Institute with the medical, academic and industry partners of the New York Genome Center (NYGC).

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) announced a new round of competition for the Advanced Manufacturing Technology Consortia (AMTech) program — a competition that will award two-year planning grants to establish new and strengthen existing industry-driven consortia to solve high-priority technology challenges and accelerate the growth of advanced manufacturing in the United States.

NIST anticipates awarding a total of $5.6 million to support multiple awards of up to $500,000 each. Program eligibility is restricted to U.S. states, local governments, institutions of higher education and nonprofit organizations. Applications are due October 31. For more information about the AMTech announcement, NIST will host webinars on August 7 and 14, beginning at 2pm EDT. Read the announcement…

In 2011, U.S.-located companies spent $29.6 billion for extramural (purchased and collaborative) research and development performed by mostly domestic organizations, according to a National Science Foundation (NSF) InfoBrief. Approximately $24 billion in R&D spending was purchased R&D. The additional $5.6 billion was payments to R&D collaborators. Extramural R&D exceeds 10 percent of all R&D expenditures by businesses in 2011, up from an estimated 4 percent in 19991. NSF researchers credit the growth in relative size of domestic extramural R&D by industry to differing rates of growth in total R&D spending among industries and of changes in the importance of external partners within industries. The findings were taken from NSF’s Business R&D and Innovation Survey. Read the brief…

As the Great Recession wanes, an increasing amount of research has been conducted to assess its impact on entrepreneurship in the United States. Authors with the Kauffman Foundation found that firm formation in the United States is remarkably constant over time, although the death rate of companies rises during recessions. Others found that despite the Great Recession causing many businesses to close their doors, the rapid rise of unemployment also drove an increase in entrepreneurs. Still, others argue that increased entrepreneurial activity was found to be related to unemployment only in those states that had already established strong levels of entrepreneurship prior to the recession.

In an increasingly globalized marketplace, the ability to penetrate the ultra-valuable U.S. market is still an end goal for companies throughout the world. Since the early 2000s, foreign governments have opened accelerators as one mechanism to provide funding, mentorship, and additional support for young firms hoping to enter the U.S. market. Although many of these accelerators feature common characteristics, each has its own strategy for best reaching the needs of its young and promising companies.

The White House Rural Council has launched a $10 billion rural economic development fund. This launch was announced last Thursday at the Rural Opportunity Investment Conference held in Washington D.C. CoBank, a Denver-based national cooperative bank, serves as the anchor investor of the fund that will be managed by Capitol Peak Asset Management. Capitol will also recruit additional institutional investors to the fund including pension funds, endowments, and foundations that are interested in investing in rural areas.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and other agencies will assist in the identification of rural projects in need of funding. They are taking particular interest in investing in rural healthcare facilities, educational facilities, water and wastewater systems, energy projects, broadband expansion efforts, and local and regional food systems. These projects can be funded wholly by private sector dollars or can be the result of public-private partnerships.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has released its latest broadband report. The report provides summarized data on Internet access connections in the U.S. (over 200 kilobits per second in at least one direction). Key findings include the number of broadband connections with downstream speeds of at least 10 Mbps increased by 118% in the U.S. between June 2012 and June 2013. Users also may access the data sets presented in the report via tables and maps hosted on the FCC website.

President Barack Obama signed the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA) into law on July 22 – a federal-wide reform effort designed to help job seekers access employment, education, training, and support services to succeed in the labor market and to match employers with the skilled workers they need to compete in the global economy. WIOA is the first legislative reform in 15 years of the public workforce system. It will take effect July 1, 2015 – key implementation dates for Department of Labor. It supersedes the Workforce Investment Act of 1998 and amends the Adult Education and Family Literacy Act, the Wagner-Peyser Act, and the Rehabilitation Act Amendments of 1998. Highlights of the new act:

JPMorgan Chase & Co. launched Small Business Forward℠ — a five-year, $30 million grant program to help industry cluster initiatives in cities across the country.  Through Small Business Forward, JPMorgan Chase will fund nonprofit organizations that work with small businesses concentrated in a single industry sector. In addition to supporting strategic planning and research, grants will help cluster organizations provide participating small businesses with access to networking opportunities; partnerships with colleges and universities; workforce and management training efforts; supplier networks; and, export promotion initiatives. Awardees include:

Anchored by the largest ever investment since the MoneyTree Report began covering venture capital investment in 1995, the $13 billion total dollars invested in the second quarter of 2014 marks the largest total quarterly investment since $13.1 billion was invested in the first quarter of 2001, according to new data from the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA) and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC) MoneyTree survey. Likewise, the $22.7 billion invested in the first half of 2014 is the highest first half total since 2001.

Between Q1 and Q2 of 2014, investment activity rose 34 percent in dollar terms and 13 percent in number of deals. First half investments in 2014 were 71 percent greater in dollars and 9 percent greater in number of deals than the first half of 2013.