SSTI Digest

The Small Business Administration has extended the deadline for states to submit proposals in response to program announcement no. FAST-01-R-001 for the Federal and State Technology Partnership (FAST). FAST will support state efforts to foster economic development among small high technology businesses through federally funded innovation and research and development programs. According to the website for the SBA Office of Science & Technology, the deadline for proposals has been extended to June 28, 2001. See http://www.sba.gov/sbir/fastextension.html

Ever wonder how many SSTI Weekly Digest articles have covered tax credits? (Answer is 47) strategic plans? (35), biotechnology? (80), workforce issues?(92), indicators? (14), telecommunications? (77), math & science? (50), capital, both seed and venture? (150)



To help make your research efforts easier, SSTI has restored the search feature for our website: http://ssti.org.master.com  Feedback from users would be appreciated.



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With an eye toward helping to make Kansas City a leading center for biomedical research, James Stower Jr., founder of American Century mutual funds, and his wife are donating $1.114 billion to the Stowers Institute of Medical Research. The donation is considered one of the five largest philanthropic gifts in history. The Institute, opened last November after completion of the $200 million campus, is engaged in basic research toward long-term solutions for gene-based diseases such as cancer and diabetes.



Already employing four molecular biologists recruited from California, Utah, Texas and London, England, and their staff, the Stowers Institute plans to have more than 50 independent research programs when fully operational.

Calling for the program to more than triple in size by 2007, Senator John F Kerry (D-Massachusetts) and several other Senators introduced legislation last week to reauthorize and expand the Small Business Technology Transfer Program (STTR). STTR currently requires five federal agencies -- the National Science Foundation, NASA, and the departments of Defense, Health & Human Services, and Energy -- to award 0.15 percent of their extramural R&D budgets to research partnerships between small businesses and research institutions. If passed, the new bill would gradually increase the set-aside requirement to 0.5 percent by fiscal year 2007.



S. 856 also calls for reauthorizing STTR through fiscal year 2010 and increasing the size of Phase II awards from $500,000 to $750,000, the same level as awards in the much larger Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program.



After its introduction, S. 856 was referred to the Senate Small Business Committee for consideration.

In today's edition of the Federal Register, the Small Business Administration (SBA) has issued the draft revised policy directive for the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Program. The public is invited to comment on the proposed directive, which provides guidance to the ten federal agencies participating in the program. SBIR annually awards more than $1 billion to small businesses across the country for research and development. Comments must be received by the SBA on or before June 18, 2001.



Legislation passed by Congress in December to reauthorize the SBIR program (Public Law 106-554) required SBA to prepare the first changes to the policy directive since 1993. While the SBIR Reauthorization Act did not include many substantive changes to the federal program, a quick review of the new policy directive reveals several proposed changes of potential interest to the tech-based economic development community.

PricewaterhouseCoopers has published the detailed statistics for the Moneytree™ survey of venture capital (VC) activity for the first quarter of 2001. As promised in the May 4, 2001 issue of the SSTI Weekly Digest when the summary results were announced, SSTI has prepared the accompanying table presenting the distribution of VC by state.



Please note, the table includes only those states in which some VC activity was reported for the quarter. Several states fell out of the latest survey as fewer deals were reported across the country.



The complete detailed statistics can be found on the PricewaterhouseCoopers website: http://204.198.129.80/