SSTI Digest

H. Day Chapin has been selected as the first Director for the new Northwest Energy Technology Collaborative.

Maxine Lunn is leaving her position as Vice President for Technology Programs at Virginia's Center for Innovative Technology to work in international development.

The Illinois Biotechnology Industry Organization has appointed David Miller to serve as president, effective September 3.

John Wik, director of Delaware's economic development office, is resigning in September to pursue interests in the private sector.

Gary Woodbury, president and CEO of the Small Business Association of Michigan for the past 15 years, has announced he will retire in June 2003.

The number of tech workers immigrating to the U.S. for jobs in the IT industry are down more than 50 percent compared to a year ago, according to figures released by the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) this week. With hundreds of dot-com closures and tens of thousands of layoffs in the information and communication technology industries, the drop was expected by many analysts.

Increasing technology opportunities in home countries such as India – traditionally a major source of IT workers under the high tech H-1B visa cap – may also contribute to the slowdown. H-1B visas are good for six years.

Recognizing the potential economic impact of biotech, nearly every state, most colleges and dozens of communities are developing programs to build bio-based economies. Everyone wants a piece of what may be the guiding field for industrial transformation over the next several decades. Is there enough bio for everyone? What strategies work for building bio-based economies? What approaches are states and localities taking, and what's working?

The answers to these key questions can't be covered in an hour. As a result, SSTI's first one-day educational workshop, Growing Your Own: Building Blocks for Bio-based Economies, will focus on how to support and nurture a strong life science industry. The event will be held October 1 in Dearborn, Michigan, immediately preceding SSTI's 6th Annual Conference. Registration at the full conference is not required to attend Growing Your Own: Building Blocks for Bio-based Economies.

Venture capital investment continued downward in the second quarter of 2002, according to the PricewaterhouseCoopers/Venture Economics/National Venture Capital Association MoneyTree™ Survey.

Total disbursements, which dropped to $5.7 billion and the lowest level since the third quarter of 1998, reflected an 11 percent decrease from the first quarter of 2002. A total of 819 companies received venture funding — a small change from the 826 companies the previous quarter.

The legal ban on non-compete contracts may have played a role in and continues to affect the development of the high tech sector in California. This is the conclusion of Rob Valletta, Research Advisor, in the August 16, 2002, edition of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco Economic Letter. The article, On the Move: California Employment Law and High-Tech Development analyzes the relationship between high tech development and states that do not legally allow non-compete contracts.

Using at- least squares statistical analysis, Valletta concludes that when non-compete contracts are prohibited, employee mobility and knowledge transfer are enhanced. While employees may not be able to share specific trade secrets, general industry knowledge can be shared readily. This freedom can then play an important role in the advancement of innovating technology sectors.

Arizona was one of the first states to embrace cluster-based economic development in the early 1990s. While the formal clusters have had varying degrees of success since then, one of the challenges of a cluster-based approach to technology-based economic development is the fractionalized focus across sectors. Because of this, clusters can end up competing against each other for limited public resources, making cross-sector strategies difficult to identify or implement.

Research and studies also are usually concentrated on a particular sector rather than looking at the similar needs and issues that arise in several clusters or span many clusters.

The Environmental Protection Agency has posted its selections for the FY 2002 Phase I solicitation of the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Program.

The Scientific Consulting Group, Inc., which provides contracted support for the EPA SBIR program, made available to SSTI the program's FY 2002 proposal statistics, allowing SSTI to generate a table presenting the state-by-state distribution of awards and proposals by number of each and number of firms. The statistical table presents how competitive the EPA SBIR program is — only 9.5 percent of the 370 proposals were selected for funding.

SSTI's table is available at: http://www.ssti.org/Digest/Tables/081602t.htm