SSTI Digest

Chris Engle, former vice president of Angelou Economics, has joined New Economy Strategies as chief project officer and principal.

BioStrategy Partners (BioSP) selected Dr. Karen Hanson as its new executive director, replacing Carolyn D'Arville, who stepped down to devote more time to young BioSP companies.

Dean Lewis was named interim president and CEO of the Science Center. Lewis replaces Pradip Banerjee, who left in January.

Aris Melissaratos is the new special adviser to the president for enterprise development at the Johns Hopkins University. The position was created for Melissaratos following his departure as secretary of the Maryland Department of Business and Economic Development.

The Maryland Technology Development Corp. has appointed Renée Winsky as its new executive director.

It is the nation’s first Entrepreneurship Week, with many events, workshops and contests taking place across the country to encourage more people to consider becoming entrepreneurs. A complete list of activities is available at www.entrepreneurshipweekusa.com. With this issue, SSTI honors America’s tech entrepreneurs – and the state and local TBED efforts designed to ensure more of these firms succeed!

America’s laurels for its record of innovation and entrepreneurship are great but there is no time to rest on those past accomplishments given the changing global economy, a recent paper by the Council on Competitiveness concludes. Where America Stands: Entrepreneurship draws from dozens of other research papers, studies and articles to provide an overview of the current entrepreneurial climate in the U.S.   In addition to pointing out some of the challenges presented by globalization, the paper cites others’ findings of many missed opportunities for even greater returns:

In the global competition to create the best markets for entrepreneurs, Hong Kong moved up from second place in 2005 to reclaim the top spot, according to the Milken Institute's 2006 Capital Access Index. Hong Kong was first in the 2004 edition of the index.    In 2006, Singapore rose from third to second place. The United Kingdom, ranking first in 2005, slipped back to third for the 2006 rankings, while the U.S. dropped from fourth to fifth because of an increase in the lending rate.   The big story is Canada, which rose from 10th place in 2005 to fourth on the latest index and shows the most improvement in scores for alternative sources of capital (moving from 30th place to 15th) and access to international capital (from 40th place to 18th).  

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) recently announced the Advanced Technology Program (ATP) will conduct a new competition in fiscal year 2007 for cost-shared awards to support high-risk industrial R&D. The ATP provides brief support to single companies or to industry-led joint ventures to accelerate the development of innovative technologies for broad national benefit through partnership with the private sector. ATP projects are selected in a competitive, peer-reviewed process. Further details will be available when the competition is formally announced in the Federal Register this spring. Proposals will not be accepted before that time. Notices containing specific information, such as anticipated funding, eligibility criteria and proposal deadlines, also will be posted to www.atp.nist.gov and www.grants.gov.

Whether you call it an incubator, accelerator, technology center or innovation zone, most communities actively engaged in promoting tech entrepreneurship can point to a building or group of buildings that houses some of those efforts. These facilities increase the success of budding tech firms by providing some combination of low-cost space, shared resources, business assistance, intellectual property assistance, and access to capital.    For incubators alone, the National Business Incubation Association tallied more than 1,400 public and private facilities as of October, 2006.   And each month there are more announcements of construction of a new center or expansion of an existing effort. Here are just four recent examples of the cornerstone of many TBED strategies:

When it comes to new firm survival in the service sector, do regions that have above-average high school dropout rates fare worse than regions with higher percentages of their adult populations earning college degrees? The answer, according to a recent discussion paper by Zoltan Acs, Catherine Armington, and Ting Zhang, is it depends.   In The Determinants of New-firm Survival across Regional Economies, the authors find, that regardless of whether the economy is in recession or growth, the higher a region’s high school dropout rates, the lower its new-firm survival rate in the service sector. [Note: High school dropouts are such a drain on state and regional economies, in fact, that many states are raising the legal age from 16 to 18 before a student can excuse himself from school permanently. For example, several governors used their State of the State Addresses this year to call for the change.]  

This week's issue of the SSTI Weekly Digest exposes just the tip of the iceberg of information available on entrepreneurship. That's where the TBED Resource Center comes in handy. The TBED Resource Center, developed by SSTI in cooperation with the U.S. Department of Commerce's Office of Technology Policy, is an interactive website providing a wealth of information for practitioners, policymakers, university faculty, and researchers alike. With links to more than 4,500 reports, the website features information in a variety of TBED-critical topics in the U.S. and abroad. More than 290 reports can be found on the TBED Resource Center when the topic entrepreneurship is selected.   SSTI staff selections include: