U.S. innovation policy, which in the latter half of the twentieth century became focused on massive federal investment in basic research, is no longer tenable, according to a new report from the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF). In the post-World War II era, the federal government funded a wide variety of costly basic research projects at U.S. universities and federal laboratories without a guiding economic strategy for these investments.

“Disinvestment in public education and increasing costs are pricing low-income students out of an education,” according to a new report from Demos.org — The Great Cost Shift: How Higher Education Cuts Undermine the Future Middle Class. Over the last two decades, the authors highlight a trend of state disinvestment has shifted the cost education from state governments to students and their families. The result of this trend is students and their families are paying and/or borrowing a significantly more for a college.

U.S. community colleges are in dire need of an overhaul, according to a report issued by the 21st Century Commission on the Future of Community Colleges. Currently, fewer than half (46 percent) of all student who enter community college with the goal of earning a degree or certificate achieve that goal. About 60 percent of students entering community college after high school must take developmental education classes to prepare for college-level work.

The Brookings Institute, in partnership with the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF), released three bold policy proposals intended to bolster the competitiveness of the U.S. manufacturing and advanced industries sector by improving innovation, workforce, and higher education connections.

The Council on Competitiveness in partnership with Deloitte released Ignite 2.0: Voices of American University Presidents and National Lab Directors on Manufacturing Competiveness, the second installment of a three-part series on improving U.S. manufacturing competitiveness. According to the report, talent-driven innovation, education and advanced skills development coupled with research, science, technology and full life-cycle commercialization are the necessary drivers for a U.S. manufacturing resurgence.

Recruiting bioscience faculty to universities and investing in R&D infrastructure tops the list of strategies recommended for Iowa to capitalize on a growing bioscience economy. A report commissioned by Innovate Iowa also finds that while significant progress has been made in growing the state's bioscience industry over the last 10 years, declining state funds to build research capacity and provide seed and venture capital remains a challenge for bioscience companies and entrepreneurs to compete regionally and globally.

Three recent reports from Maine provide insight into the challenges of fostering an innovative economy in a rural state. Overall, the research suggests that Maine has done well in its efforts to support startups, but could do more to help those startups expand and find new markets. By encouraging innovation-based businesses to expand to markets outside of Maine and by offering mentoring services, the state could overcome the stagnation that can occur when companies and states focus on local markets.

University-industry collaborations need a paradigm shift from the traditional one-way knowledge transfer model to a two-way knowledge co-creation model, according to a new report from the Big Innovation Centre (BIC) — Collaborate to Innovate.

A new report from the National Academies' National Research Council urges the U.S. federal government, state government, business and universities to act in concert to preserve the competitiveness of the nation's research universities. The report, a follow-up to 2005's Rising Above the Gathering Storm, suggests that a number of ongoing trends threaten U.S. global leadership in higher education. The most critical of these issues are declining federal funding for university research and the erosion of state support for higher education in general.