The India Ministry of Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises announced last week a plan to provide funding to 50 universities and training institutions for the creation of up to 100 enterprise incubators within innovative fields.

 

Angela Kreps is the first president of the year-old Kansas Bioscience Organization.

To support innovation and technology with increased accessibility for small-and medium-sized firms, Canada's Minister of Industry, David Emerson, announced a new program that will replace Technology Partnerships Canada (TPC).

The Economic Development Board of Bahrain and Kuwait Finance House have begun planning a $1 billion (US) Science and Technology Park in Bahrain. The park will be modeled on the Sophia Antipolis Technology Park in France, which is the largest of its kind in Europe and the second-largest technology park in the world, according to the European Commission’s PAXIS innovation program. The Kuwait Finance House has appointed Philippe Mariani, former director of the French park to oversee the new project.

 

ANGLE, an international venture management and consulting company with broad experience in technology development initiatives at the regional and national level, has position openings for a consultant and a senior executive. These starting-level positions would assist ANGLE's U.S. Consulting and Management operation on domestic and international projects. Both positions require someone with a Ph.D.

The Kansas City region is obtaining funding for high-tech research in the life sciences, but entrepreneurship is stifled because of fragmented efforts to improve the innovation environment and the region’s lack of an overall strategy for its various stakeholders. This finding and others were identified in Completing the Puzzle: Creating a High-Tech and Life Sciences Economy in Kansas City, a recent report prepared for the Brookings Institution Metropolitan Policy Program.

Britain’s Pre Budget Report 2005, released Dec. 5, calls for the United Kingdom to double spending for stem cell research to £100M within the next two years and launch a number of new initiatives to sustain innovation and science.

In China, leaders of the rapidly growing nation dogged by soaring energy needs and unrelenting pollution problems made a commitment to double the nation’s use of renewable energy resources within the next 15 years.

The Kansas Technology Enterprise Corp. promoted Kevin Carr to the position of chief operations officer.

Sandy Johnson was promoted to CEO of the Mid-America Manufacturing Technology Center.

A study suggests policies enacted in 1999 to encourage cooperative research, establish tech transfer structures and provide venture capital contributed to a dramatic shift in the biotech topography in France.

While many regions, states and countries are lamenting a drain of talent from their area, the Pakistan Higher Education Commission is taking an opposite strategy to strengthen the nation's science and research capacity: sending up to 15,000 of its brightest students to study selected disciplines abroad through its Foreign Ph.D. Scholarship Program.

In the opening ceremony of the 2005 FORTUNE Global Forum, held in Beijing on May 16, Chinese President Hu Jintao broadly outlined the course his country is taking to reach a goal of quadrupling its 2000 Gross Domestic Product (GDP) by the year 2020. Science, technology and innovation figure prominently in the strategy.

Recognizing the economic benefits of engaging young people in science and technology, Ontario's McGuinty government recently launched the Youth Science and Technology Outreach Program. The new program links high school students with researchers to support in-depth mentorship experience and postsecondary career advice.

Do tax credits pave the way for more investment in R&D and equity investments in new enterprises? Or, do they reward companies and venture capitalists for investments they would have made anyway?

Discussions on these questions can become quite heated and fueled by data supportive of both sides, as two new academic analyses demonstrate.

There are several factors that go into location decisions for biomedical firms. Proximity to strong university research capacity, other biotech businesses, and technically competent workers are all important considerations. With the financial investments many states and localities are making toward the life sciences, however, the field of prospective locations for successfully launching a biotech firm has grown considerably larger than the "usual suspects."

Jerry Lonergan, president of Kansas, Inc., is resigning effective April 1. A bill to dissolve the state's policy and planning organization passed the Kansas Senate last week.

To spur job creation in Ontario, the provincial government recently announced two initiatives focusing on innovation and regional economic growth -- the new Fuel Cell Innovation Program and the newly refocused Northern Ontario Heritage Fund Corporation (NOHFC).

During the past decade, the European Union (EU) invested heavily in civilian R&D by building first-class laboratories and expanding higher education in science and engineering. Its efforts, according to the Data Brief for a new National Science Foundation report, Human Resources for Science and Technology: The European Region, are narrowing the lead the U.S. holds in R&D.

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[Editor's Note: SSTI is excited to welcome Phillip Battle to its staff as a policy analyst. The author of this article, Phil recently received his Master in Public Affairs degree from the LBJ School at the University of Texas at Austin. His area of research interest is technology policy and economic development.]

Joni Cobb is the first president of KTEC Pipeline, Kansas's new technology entrepreneurship fellowship program.