SSTI Digest

South Dakota Gov. Mike Rounds selected Richard Benda as the new Secretary for the Department of Tourism and State Development.

Bob Dayton was named president of the Delaware BioScience Association.

Effective in May, Ken Janoski will be the president and CEO of BioGenerator, a nonprofit in St. Louis that helps scientists commercialize their discoveries.

Medical Alley and MNBIO, two organizations that merged in 2005 to promote medical sciences in Minnesota, have changed their name LifeScience Alley.

The Maryland Department of Business and Economic Development appointed Christine Plater as its new director of small business programs.

The South Dakota Biotech Industry Association, a new resource for biotech companies in the state, has formed.

The on/off binary fundamental of information and communication technology (ICT) could just as well describe the U.S. position in the field. For the third time in five years, the U.S. leads all nations on the Networked Readiness Index (NRI) contained in the World Economic Forum's Global Information Technology Report 2005-2006.

Expanded to track 115 economies worldwide in its fifth edition, the new Global Information Technology Report assesses the impact of ICT on the development process and the competitiveness of nations. The NRI measures the propensity for countries to leverage the opportunities offered by ICT for development and increased competitiveness. It also establishes a broad international framework mapping out the enabling factors of such capacity.

African-American and Hispanic students begin college interested in majoring in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields at rates similar to those of white and Asian-American students and persist in these fields through their third year of study, but do not earn their bachelor’s degrees at the same rate as their peers, according to a new analysis conducted by the American Council on Education (ACE).

Increasing the Success of Minority Students in Science and Technology also finds that the majority of the African-American and Hispanic students majoring in STEM fields who persisted beyond the third year did not drop out, but were still enrolled and working toward a degree after six years.

The advances being made in nanotechnology-based research are likely to impact most industry sectors eventually as more commercial applications are identified. As a result, the National Nanotechnology Initiative has been a research priority for the federal government for many years. Nanotech research is occurring around the world, but, at this point, the majority of effort is concentrated in several leading universities and private companies. A new report by the Southern Growth Policies Board (Southern) reveals the South, while performing about 20 percent of all nanotechnology research activity in the U.S., would benefit greatly through a formalized regional nanotechnology network.

Gov. Dirk Kempthorne recently received some good news about his future when President Bush nominated him to serve as Secretary of the U.S. Department of Interior. The news was not as rosy on the home front for Idaho's economic future, however, as the state legislature in late March rejected the governor's plans for Idaho to take a more proactive role toward building a tech-based economy.

Just as bread won't rise without yeast, the key knowledge-building ingredients for many state tech-based economic development strategies - increasing investments in university-based research, emphasizing workforce development and science and math education, and identifying clusters of co-located firms in related industry sectors - won't lead to the spillovers of knowledge critical to sustaining growth without an active reagent. The new discussion paper from the London-based Centre for Economic Policy Research, Growth & Entrepreneurship: An Empirical Assessment, by authors Zoltan Acs, David Audretsch, Pontus Braunerhjelm and Bo Carlsson concludes that technology-based entrepreneurship serves as that reagent.

Using statistics from the National Science Foundation’s report Science & Engineering Indicators 2006, SSTI has prepared a table presenting 2003 state rankings for industrial R&D intensity - the ratio of industry R&D to gross state product (GSP).

The national average in industrial R&D intensity for 2003 was 1.81 percent. Among the fourteen states that placed above the national average, Michigan held the highest rank at 4.24 percent followed by Washington (3.76 percent), Massachusetts (3.73 percent), Connecticut (3.35 percent) and California (3.28 percent).

Conversely, Alaska ranked the lowest in the nation at 0.11 percent, with South Dakota (0.27 percent), Montana (0.25 percent), Louisiana (0.20 percent), and Wyoming (0.17 percent) rounding off the final five.