SSTI Digest

A new coalition funded by the Lumina Foundation and driven by manufacturing experts from across the country has formed to help solve the recruitment challenge and build a more racially inclusive future for manufacturing. The Urban Manufacturing Alliance teamed up with The Century Foundation to launch Industry and Inclusion 4.0. It is focused on developing partnerships with employers, educational institutions, and community groups, and deploying training models anchored by industry-recognized credentials, while focusing on how to improve chances of success for a new more diverse workforce. Work that has already started ranges from the services workforce development organizations can offer companies behind the scenes to the training they already offer to young adults in their communities.

COVID-19 is not just wreaking havoc across the national and global economies but is specifically causing that damage in a way that widens the existing fault lines between the “haves” and “have-nots.” Further, as countries and companies contemplate the possibility of managing operations alongside the new coronavirus, rather than an entirely “post-COVID” society, there is little reason to believe the worsening economic inequality will mend without specific intervention. The problem will not be easy to solve.

As SSTI covered last November, income inequality worsened in America — and in all 50 states — between 2006 and 2018, a period that includes the Great Recession. According to the World Bank, America rates worse on income equality than all countries with which our economy or power is often compared, including China, Germany, Japan, Russia and the United Kingdom.

Banking regulators recently announced new rules, effective in October, that will allow banks to invest in venture capital funds. These arrangements had been barred by the “Volcker Rule,” which was put in place after over-leveraged banks caused a global financial crisis in 2008. A statement by the National Venture Capital Association praised the change and predicted a “significant impact on entrepreneurial capital formation … particularly in emerging ecosystems.”

Just 10 percent of STEM faculty at four-year institutions are from underrepresented backgrounds, according to a new report by the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities. The report and an accompanying guidebook, which were supported by the NSF INCLUDES grant, look at the lack of individuals from underrepresented backgrounds in STEM faculty positions and outline several key findings and steps for higher education leaders, researchers, and policymakers to bolster diversity in STEM faculty.

The longer the pandemic lasts, the greater the jeopardy to many small businesses. A recent report from McKinsey & Company finds that the sectors most affected by the coronavirus and the least financially resilient include 1.7 million small businesses, employ 20 million workers, and earn 12 percent of U.S. business revenue. Additional research from JPMorgan Chase & Co found that small business revenues dropped as much as 50 percent and cash balances dropped 12.7 percent through April 2020, with Black and Asian-owned businesses suffering larger declines than white-owned businesses. With their roles as employers, economic multipliers and community hubs, the McKinsey report notes that interventions need to give more than immediate relief and help build longer-term resilience.

A new report by the Urban Institute indicates that the Opportunity Zone (OZ) tax incentive program has had varied success throughout the country. An Early Assessment of Opportunity Zones for Equitable Development Projects assesses the effects that OZs have had within low-income communities while also reviewing the types of developments that have benefited most from the incentive. An over-arching finding in the report is that it has been difficult for mission-oriented and community-driven projects to access capital, as investors have instead focused on funding projects that can produce larger, short-term returns, including luxury real estate properties. The authors suggest that policymakers could redesign the program to better incentivize investments that target innovative small business opportunities and equitable community-focused projects.

Since 2005, the One North Carolina Small Business Program has made 423 SBIR/STTR matching awards worth nearly $26 million to more than 250 businesses throughout the state. A new assessment, which updates an earlier report, provides academic rigor to a standard program review. The results indicate that even beyond survey-based attestations to the program’s value, there is a statistically-significant impact of North Carolina’s funding for the competitiveness of recipients.

The new assessment is published in the Annals of Science and Technology Policy by John W. Hardin and David J. Kaiser of the North Carolina Board of Science, Technology, and Innovation and Albert N. Link of UNC Greensboro, the editor-in-chief of the publication. The most original portion of the article is an assessment of program data using regression analysis, which provides a more rigorous evaluation of relationships between variables than can be achieved through correlation alone.

Tulsa Innovation Labs has received a $50 million commitment from the George Kaiser Family Foundation to help develop the city of Tulsa as a technology hub. The funds will go towards assisting the new organization to support local talent, startups and academic innovation.

Tulsa Innovation Labs, founded earlier this year, has already begun identifying the most promising areas of growth including virtual health, energy tech, drones, cyber and analytics. The organization intends to define its first phase of initiatives by the end of the year, and with input from university, industry and community leaders’ initiatives will likely include a mix of startup incubation and acceleration, workforce development and academic innovation.

This week’s release of the Annual Survey of Manufacturers (ASM) from the Census Bureau provides the most detailed statistics on the U.S. manufacturing sector and provides a snapshot of where the sector stood prior to the pandemic. Based on the 2018 summary statistics, the Census Bureau offers the following preliminary insights which can also be seen in the image below.

With efforts underway to return people to jobs, the time is ripe to rethink our approach to the workforce. Instead of returning to the way things were, now is the time to re-think the kind of country we want to have says Carl Van Horn, founding director of the Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University. Van Horn and Jane Oates, president of WorkingNation, presented their ideas for workforce recovery and lessons learned from the Great Recession during a Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta Center of Workforce Development webinar yesterday.

The NIH’s High-Risk, High-Reward Research program (HRHR) has the potential to overturn fundamental paradigms, but historically the applicant and awardee pools have not fully represented the demographic and geographic diversity across the U.S. biomedical workforce, says the NIH’s deputy director for extramural research. Those concerns, and others about bias in the peer review process, have led to a new approach — the HRHR program is going to anonymize the review of the Transformative Research Award applications.

It is hoped that the new process, which will anonymize the identity of applicant institutions and investigators until the last phase of the award’s three-phase review process, will focus on the merit of the research and limit potential unconscious bias and encourage applications from investigators who otherwise may not have applied because of perceived bias.

The Massachusetts Technology Collaborative (MassTech) — the state agency responsible for strengthening the commonwealth’s position as a leading hub for innovation and entrepreneurship — recently released the 2019 edition of its annual report, The Index of the Massachusetts Innovation Economy, which includes an updated list of the 10 leading technology states  and a detailed special analysis on entrepreneurial ecosystems. As a globally recognized center of science- and technology-based innovation, communities across the U.S. can learn from Massachusetts’ successes as well as from the challenges the state faces in further strengthening its entrepreneurship ecosystem.