SSTI Digest

The European Council and the European Parliament have reached a provisional agreement to strengthen Europe’s semiconductor ecosystem, a deal designed to double the EU’s global market share in semiconductors from 10% to 20% by 2030. The agreement is projected to mobilize more than $47 billion (€43 billion) in public and private investments, with $3.6 billion (€3.3 billion) coming from the EU budget. The agreement — which still needs to be finalized, endorsed and formally adopted — contains three main lines of action: The “Chips for Europe Initiative”, to support large-scale technological capacity building; A framework to ensure security of supply and resilience by attracting investment; and, A Monitoring and Crisis Response system to anticipate supply shortages and provide responses in case of crisis. The European Commission’s proposed framework for its Chips Act was first published in February 2022 and is available here.

Mark your calendar for Sept. 6-8 to join us in Atlanta for the 2023 SSTI Annual Conference! Attendees will have the chance to share best practices and problem solve with colleagues who share your passion for innovation. There will be opportunities to explore funding sources to help take your projects to the next level, learn about the latest trends and topics in the innovation economy, and more! Save the date now and stay tuned for additional information on registration and this year’s agenda.

A study titled Incubators, accelerators and urban economic development,[1] published in the Urban Studies Journal last year, found positive impacts on employment and access to capital for participants. The study examines the impacts of accelerators and incubators on urban economic development through a systematic review of Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)-wide evaluations, making use of policymaker and academic consultations, finding that both accelerators and incubators raise participant employment while accelerators have the additional benefit of aiding access to finance. The authors define an accelerator as a cohort-based program that provides intensive support to early-stage startups with the aim of helping them rapidly grow and scale their businesses, typically over a short period of time. An incubator, on the other hand, provides a physical workspace along with entrepreneurial development services, business support resources to early-stage companies, with the goal of helping them develop and launch their businesses, often over a longer period of time. Key findings from the review of 14 studies: Both accelerators and…

Technologies developed by West Virginia University and the University of North Dakota in Grand Forks that extract and separate rare elements and critical minerals from acid mine drainage and coal waste, will each receive $8 million in funding from the U.S. Department of Energy. According to West Virginia University Today, the grant is part of the Investing in America agenda under the Biden Administration. Project lead Paul Ziemkiewicz notes that it is meant to lead to the design, construction and operation of a pre-commercial demonstration facility for separating and refining rare earth elements and critical minerals. The funding was announced as part of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to bring critical mineral supply chains to the U.S. and reduce reliance on competitors like China. The U.S. imports more than 80% of its rare earth elements and critical minerals. John Kay at the Environmental Research Center at University of North Dakota noted that the greatest motive for initiating this project is national security and independence. Although rare earth mining develops a new industry within the country, Kay alluded to the reality that the U.S. (…

The U.S. Census Bureau in February released a new experimental data product designed to better measure the business dynamics of innovative firms (BDS-IF). The new Business Dynamics Statistics of U.S. High Tech Industries provides measures of business dynamics for what the Census classifies as high-tech and non-high-tech industries, defined by science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) occupation intensity. A Census analysis on the data reveals that high-tech industries are concentrated in five coastal metro areas. The figures show the quantity and proportion of employment in high-tech industries around America. The bigger the dot, the more people are employed in those high-tech industries, quantitatively. The darker the dot, the bigger the proportion of high-tech employment in that area. The Census Bureau released a list of North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) codes used to qualify industries as “high-tech” for the statistics. The Bureau used the concentration of STEM occupation employment as described by Goldschlag and Miranda in their article "Business dynamics statistics of High Tech industries" that appeared in the Spring…

The U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) recently unveiled a new strategy aimed at improving and increasing access to work experiences for young people. Emphasizing the need for a comprehensive vision to address the challenges young people face in accessing education, training, and meaningful work experiences, the Youth Employment Works strategy represents the first national youth employment strategy in over two decades.

A new Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) release shows that over the past five years of available data (2018-2022), nationwide per capita personal income increased by 21.64%, rising from $53,786 to $65,423, with an average yearly percentage change of +5.04%. While personal income grew 23.39% during this period, from around $17.67 trillion to $21.80 trillion (+5.41% per year on average), this article will focus solely on per capita personal income, examining both nationwide and interstate trends from 2018-2022 with an emphasis on uncovering the impacts of the pandemic. Personal income refers to the total income of all residents in an area, while per capita personal income measures the average income earned per person in a given area. Although personal income is commonly used as a measure of economic productivity, per capita personal income is more useful for comparisons between regions as it standardizes income by population. Focusing on per capita personal income is particularly important when examining state-level trends, as it mitigates the differences in personal income found in states with exceptionally high or low populations, as well as those with large shifts in…

EDA is now accepting applications for its $4.5 million FY 2023 STEM Talent Challenge to support programs to train science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) talent and help fuel regional innovation economies. The competition will provide funding for programs that help build a robust STEM workforce in emerging and transformative sectors such as aerospace, aeronautics, biotechnology, advanced manufacturing, cybersecurity, among others.  Competitive applications will demonstrate how the program will develop or expand regional STEM workforce capacity to support entrepreneurial ventures, industries of the future, and other innovation-driven businesses. Eligible applicants include cities, counties, states, other political subdivisions of states, and Tribal Nations; as well as non-profit organizations, public-private partnerships, federal laboratories or science/research parks, institutions of higher education, Economic Development Organizations, and consortia of the aforementioned with government support. Administered by EDA’s Office of Innovation and Entrepreneurship (OIE), the STEM challenge is meant to build upon the momentum of OIE’s …

Last year's Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) reauthorization included a new requirement that participating agencies work to identify foreign connections of applying companies. Certain types of connections to “countries of concern,” which include China and Russia, could result in the small business being prohibited from receiving federal funds. The U.S. Small Business Administration has now published a template for disclosure of foreign relationships that will be part of the latest SBIR policy directive and that all agencies will be expected to use. The template is available for public comment through May 3 in the Federal Register.

What is the value of a college degree today? While tuition costs continue to rise, opinions on the perceived value of the degrees institutions of higher education provide are falling. This sentiment, as highlighted in recent reports from New America and Gallup, demonstrates the need to re-examine the role of postsecondary education in shaping successful career pathways and the challenges individuals face while navigating an ever-evolving labor market.

The objective of the Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR) is to help states receiving the least amount of federal research and development (R&D) funds within their postsecondary institutions improve their competitiveness for federal grants and awards. A measure of EPSCoR's effectiveness, then, is whether or not the state's academic research enterprise is capturing a larger share of federal R&D expenditures. This article utilizes data from the Higher Education Research and Development (HERD) survey, analyzing the total and federal HERD dollars for the 25 current EPSCoR eligible states compared to those not eligible, finding: 1) EPSCoR states are not receiving proportionately more federal HERD dollars and 2) EPSCoR states have an extremely large variation of total HERD dollars between states, inclusive of both the highest grossing states as well as all three states experiencing a decrease.

Following a jolt of outmigration and population declines from some of the country’s most populous counties in 2021, new data from the U.S. Census Bureau reveal that county growth patterns are returning to pre-pandemic rates. The U.S. Census Bureau’s Vintage 2022 estimates of population and components of change found that many college counties saw a rebound in 2022, a pattern that was observed in many metropolitan counties in the South and West. “The migration and growth patterns for counties edged closer to pre-pandemic levels this year,” said Dr. Christine Hartley, assistant division chief for estimates and projections in the Census Bureau’s population division, in a press release on the data. “Some urban counties, such as Dallas and San Francisco, saw domestic outmigration at a slower pace between 2021 and 2022, compared to the prior year. Meanwhile, many counties with large universities saw their populations fully rebound this year as students returned." Over one-half (52.5%) of all 3,144 counties grew between 2021 and 2022, down from 55.7% of counties the prior year. Counties with populations below 10,000 experienced more population loss (60.8…