SSTI Digest

The Illinois Science & Energy Innovation Foundation, a $72.5 million investment fund approved by the state's General Assembly last year, debuted this week. While 70 percent of the fund will be used to educate consumers about smart grid technology, another $22.5 million, provided by utility companies, will support grants, loans and contracts to groups working on smart grid technologies, according to the Chicago Tribune. Read more about the fund...

Whether to attract federal grants, keep up with demand to graduate more highly skilled students, or advance the capabilities for research and exploration, universities are pushing for state funding to invest in science buildings and other infrastructure needed to expand research capacity and improve competitiveness. In New Jersey, a measure to approve $750 million in higher education borrowing to build and renovate campus facilities will go to the voters in November. Meanwhile, university leaders in New York and Utah recently pitched proposals to state leaders for new science and technology buildings they say will educate more students and create high-wage jobs.

New Jersey
Backed by Gov. Chris Christie, the New Jersey measure is the first higher education bond issue to appear on the ballot in 24 years. While borrowing for capital improvement would be divided among the state's public and private colleges, a provision was added to the law excluding private colleges with endowments of more than $1 billion from receiving any of the funds.

The U.S. economy is poised to create up to five million new manufacturing jobs by 2020 due to increasing demand for U.S. exports, according to new research from the Boston Consulting Group (BCG). Since 2006, U.S. exports have risen by 30 percent — far outpacing the growth in gross domestic product (GDP). BCG senior partner, Harold L. Sirkin, projects that the demand for U.S. exports will continue to grow, leading to an American Manufacturing renaissance between 2015 and 2020. This positive news contradicts prevailing attitudes about the declining competitiveness of the U.S. manufacturing sector, especially in comparison to China.

The Obama administration announced the winners of the third round of the i6 Challenge, a national competition to support proof of concept centers at universities and research consortiums across the country. Approximately $7 million will be awarded to support seven proof of concept centers — based in California, Florida, Indiana, Missouri, New Mexico, Virginia and Wisconsin — that will establish regional networks of experts to support innovators and researchers, expand access to capital and connect mentors/advisors to entrepreneurs and small businesses. Read the press release...

The Department of Labor announced over $175 million in new funding for community colleges to grow and enhance their manufacturing education and training programs through partnerships with local employers. Part of the $500 million Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and Career Training (TAACCCT) initiative, the grants are intended to promote skills development and employment opportunities in advanced manufacturing. Through the TAACCCT initiative, each state plus the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico will receive at least $2.5 million in dedicated funding for community college career training programs in fields such as advanced manufacturing, transportation, health care and other science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) careers. Read the press release...

The National Science Foundation (NSF), in partnership with NASA, the National Institutes of Health and the U.S. Department of Agriculture awarded nearly $50 million to grantees for the development and use of robots that cooperatively work with people to enhance individual human capabilities, performance and safety. These awards mark the first round of awards of the Obama administration's National Robotics Initiative (NRI), a federal program established in 2011 to spur innovative robotics research and applications emphasizing the realization of co-robots acting in direct support of and in a symbiotic relationship with human partners. Awardees represented universities from across the country including Arizona State University, Carnegie-Melon University, Georgia Institute of Technology, Idaho State University, Michigan State University, Stanford University and the University of Utah. Read the press release...

NSF and its partners also released a new $15 million funding announcement for the National Robotics Initiative to support up to 40 new robotics research projects across two funding tracks:

During a lively discussion session — Recent Federal Efforts: What's Happened, What's Working and What Should Change — SSTI will bring together the members of the economic development community to review what the federal government has done, how it has worked for the tech-based economic development community, and what changes should be made to improve the federal programs. Whether it's multi-agency initiatives such as the i6 Challenge Jobs and Innovation Accelerator Challenge or single agency activity at the U.S. Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation, and the Small Business Administration, the federal government's involvement in encouraging economic growth through science, technology and innovation has escalated in recent years. This session will give you the opportunity to share your thoughts on their successes, failures and what they can do better. Learn more about this session by visiting the conference website.

llinois Gov. Pat Quinn has announced the details of a $10.3 million planned partnership to develop "STEM Learning Exchanges" across the state. Eight organizations will be awarded contracts to work with regional, educational and business networks to aggregate curricular resources, assessment tools, professional development systems, work-based learning opportunities and problem-based learning challenges. Funding for the initiative will be drawn from $2.3 million in federal Race to the Top funds, with another $8 million leveraged from private partnerships. Learn more...

On September 17, 2012, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) implemented seven provisions of the Leahy-Smith America Invents Act of 2011 (AIA) including:

To reflect an evolving mission that expands the scope of genomics research, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced a major reorganization that will establish four new divisions to constitute the National Genome Research Institute's Extramural Research Program. The multi-divisional structure will help the institute pursue its enhanced mission for using genomics to advance medical science and improve human health, which has become a greater focus from its original mission to unravel the Human Genome, according to NIH. Read the press release...

Responding to Gov. Nathan Deal's Complete College Georgia initiative launched last year, all of the state's institutions in the University System and Technical College System have submitted plans for how they will meet the governor's goal of adding 250,000 post-secondary graduates to the state by 2020. For Georgia's research universities, graduating more students translates to more workers prepared to enter careers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields. Some of the strategies include enhancing instructional delivery and improving access for underrepresented groups and military veterans.

Each of the institutions was tasked with developing plans that addressed data collection and analysis to identify areas for improvement, partnerships with K-12 to improve readiness, access to college, the reduction of time to earn a degree, new models of instruction and learning, and the transformation of remediation.

U.S. economic policy will require a renewed focus on production and globally traded sectors in order to restore U.S. competitiveness, according to a new report from the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF). Furthering the argument laid out in the recently published book Innovation Economics: The Race for Global Advantage and in last year's report "The Case for a National Manufacturing Strategy", ITIF's Stephen J. Ezell and Robert D. Atkinson present 50 recommendations for federal reform to restore the U.S.' competitive edge. In addition, the report provides another 13 strategies that could make a difference at the state level.