SSTI Digest

Dan Curran is the new director of the Business Development Division of the Nebraska Department of Development.

Ted Ford, former president and CEO of the Edison Welding Institute, recently was named president and CEO of TECHColumbus.

Sandy Johnson, interim CEO of the Mid-American Manufacturing Technology Center, was appointed to the position on a permanent basis.

Roger Kilmer was appointed director of the Hollings Manufacturing Extension Partnership program at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Kilmer served as acting director since Kevin Carr's departure last June.

Sean O'Kane, commissioner of the New Hampshire Department of Resources and Economic Development, is resigning from the position at the end of his two-year term in March to return to the private sector.

BioFlorida President Diana Robinson is leaving to join a private venture capital company once her replacement is selected.

Tim Rubald, interim executive director of the Nevada Commission on Economic Development, was appointed to the position on a permanent basis.

Harvard University President Lawrence Summers announced his resignation this afternoon. Former Harvard president Derek Bok is to serve as interim president for the university.

Over the last year, there has been increased public and government attention on issues involving tech-based economic development. For much of the year, Thomas Friedman's The World is Flat has dominated the New York Times bestseller list. A series of reports from the AeA, Council on Competitiveness, and the National Academy of Sciences call for increased action by the federal government. To help address a flattening world, Congress is now considering significant bi-partisan legislation addressing those report's recommendations. And just in the last month, a series of governors have unveiled plans for dramatic new investments in innovation, science, and technology.



It is fitting, then, that President Bush made competitiveness a major theme of his State of the Union and, in his budget proposal, unveiled his American Competitiveness Initiative (see below for details).

During his 2006 State of the Union Address, President Bush outlined a decade-long $50 billion American Competitiveness Initiative (ACI) for R&D, education and entrepreneurship. The FY 2007 downpayment on ACI is $5.9 billion, which is accomplished by shuffling priorities within a shrinking federal discretionary budget environment to find $1.3 billion in new funding and $4.6 billion in R&D tax incentives. Specifically, ACI calls for:

Perennially a favorite target for Congressional earmarks, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) budget, at $92.8 billion, is nearly $3 billion below the FY 2006 level of anticipated expenditures. More than three-fourths of the USDA budget outlays for FY 2007 are dedicated to mandatory spending programs such as nutrition assistance, conservation, export promotion and farm commodity programs. The remaining balance of $21.5 billion, $1.7 billion or 7.3 percent less than the FY06 outlay level, is for discretionary programs. All USDA research and TBED-related programs fall within the discretionary section of the budget.

The Administration's FY 2007 $6.138 billion discretionary budget request for the Department of Commerce reflects a 4.23 percent decrease from the FY06 appropriation of $6.410 billion. However, the Economic Development Administration (EDA) would receive a $46.7 million increase to support programs within the Administration's new American Competitiveness Initiative (ACI), announced in the president's State-of-the-Union Address. The NIST Hollings Manufacturing Extension Program, on the other hand, is slated for a cut of $58.3 million in the FY07 request.