SSTI Digest

Socially-responsible entrepreneurs at the University of Maryland now have a new financial resource available to help them get new businesses off the ground. The university's Impact Pre-Seed Fund program will offer grants to students with business plans that could offer potential benefits to global society. Students participating in the university's Hinman CEOs program and the Hillman Entrepreneurs program will be eligible for two kinds of grants: Seed Fund grants of $2,000 to $5,000 will be awarded to students with complete, well researched business plans, and Opportunity Assessment grants of $500 to $1,000 will be available to fund promising ideas that require additional research. Each grantee will be assigned a mentor to help guide the new business and to monitor the use of the award.

Earlier this year, Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano and the Arizona State Legislature committed $100 million over four years to support Science Foundation Arizona, a nonprofit public-private partnership to coordinate the state’s R&D investments in science and technology. The catch? The law required a dollar-to-dollar match of non-government funding of the annual $25 million allotment before the state could release its funding to Science Foundation Arizona.

 

The initial $35 million appropriation for 2007 did not come with the restriction. Science Foundation Arizona allocated $30 million of that funding to 55 recipients for projects ranging from improving science and math education to commercializing new research discoveries.

 

The first funds to be affected by the tight purse strings are for fiscal year 2008, which potentially created a sizable hurdle for developing and sustaining a long-term S&T investment strategy for the organization and state.

 

At some point, most start-up businesses require an infusion of outside capital to grow into a profitable enterprise. This infusion often comes in the form of venture capital (VC) investment, which provides capital and some degree of managerial guidance in exchange for an equity stake in the company. Venture investment can be a blessing for entrepreneurs looking to survive the risk-filled early stage of firm development and to professionalize their business, but it also reduces the entrepreneur's incentive to create a highly profitable company. The entrepreneur loses some of the freedom to govern the company as he sees fit, and once the company makes a successful exit, the venture investors will claim their share of the profits.

 

Within economic development literature, many researchers believe the success of regional industry clusters is dependent on the strength and quantity of local “gatekeepers” – the organizations, firms and individuals that both draw knowledge from outside the region and distribute knowledge within the region. But what are the characteristics of these gatekeepers that may lead to a more productive exchange of knowledge?

 

In a recent paper, Gatekeepers in Regional Networks of Innovators, Holger Graf investigates the actions of these entities within four economically diverse regions of Germany. Graf gauged the relationships inside and outside of a region by analyzing information about the patents filed. He used the number of patents filed by an entity as a proxy for its size, and concluded size was not a major reason for being a gatekeeper. However, the number of distinct inventors that appear on an entity’s filed patents, known as the absorptive capacity, was found to be a very important predictor of being a gatekeeper.

 

Complete descriptions of these opportunities and others are available at http://www.ssti.org/posting.htm.



Following its corporate mission of "turning knowledge into practice," RTI International is launching an initiative aimed at eliminating underdevelopment and unlocking opportunity in economic growth centers throughout the U.S. and worldwide. For this initiative, RTI seeks to immediately fill two important positions: (1) a program manager for innovation-based economic development who will play a key role in leading this initiative with other professionals across RTI and (2) an economic development analyst who will design, manage, and support technology-based economic development research and implementation projects. Each position has its own set of responsibilities and qualifications.