The National Science Foundation (NSF) has announced awards for Conceptualization Grants (CG) for Quantum Leap Challenge Institutes, which are large-scale interdisciplinary research projects that aim to advance the frontiers of quantum information science and engineering.

SSTI and conference host Rhode Island Commerce Corporation are pleased to announce Gov. Gina Raimondo is scheduled to deliver welcoming remarks during the opening plenary session and officially kick off SSTI’s Annual Conference in Providence on September 10!

The Federal Laboratory Consortium (FLC) is accepting federal laboratory T2 partnership story submissions for an online publication of state and local government successes this year. Recognizing that federal lab and state and local government partnerships are critical to the nation’s economy, FLC will showcase the regional value that results from such partnerships. The stories will be published in the FLC Success Stories Gallery and promoted across different media channels. The submission deadline is Oct.

Home to the Research Triangle Park and top-tier research universities like Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the Durham-Chapel Hill metropolitan area led all regions in per capita NIH funding in FY 2018 and placed sixth in total funding that year, according to a new analysis by SSTI. This edition of Useful Stats looks at all NIH awards at the regional level over the five-year period between FY 2014 and FY 2018.

The Department of Labor recently announced awards totaling $183.8 million in Scaling Apprenticeships Through Sector-Based Strategies grants. Funded through H-1B visa fees, the grants will support the training of more than 85,000 apprentices. The grantees include 23 academic institutions and grant-matching industry consortia representing 18 states, and includes three SSTI members — the University of Cincinnati, Lorain County Community College and the State University of New York Research Foundation.

A recent report from Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce (CEW) details the changes in manufacturing’s geographic concentration across the country between 1940 and 2016. Manufacturing was the largest source of employment in 15 states in 1940, concentrated in the Northeast and Midwest, and had grown to the largest source of employment in 18 states by 2000, concentrated in the Southeast and central states.

Several mega-deal IPOs, including Uber, Zoom and Pinterest, and strong merger and acquisition activity, combined to create a record-setting $188.5 billion in venture-backed exit value for the first half of 2019, according to VentureMonitor, the quarterly report on venture capital investment compiled by the National Venture Capital Association and PitchBook. According to the report, the six-month total for 2019 has already topped the full-year total for all prior years.

Earning a college degree has long been touted as a prerequisite for getting a good job with the wages needed to support a middle class lifestyle, or better. However, as tuition rates have continued to rise across the country, so too has the burden of student loan debt.

While the labor force participation rate of prime-age individuals (age 25 to 54) remains below its pre-recession level, it has been increasing since 2015. A recent report from the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City found that college-educated women have made the largest contribution to this recovery.

In 2019, the administrations and legislatures in many states grappled with if and how to adjust state economic development initiatives to leverage the federal Opportunity Zone (OZ) program. The actions of 12 states that implemented new activities are described below.

The Senate confirmed the nomination of Jovita Carranza to become the administrator of the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) this week. During her recent confirmation hearing, Carranza was pushed on the committee’s concerns about the leadership of SBA’s Office of Innovation and Investment, which overseas both the Small Business Investment Corporation (SBIC) program and SBA’s SBIR/STTR policy office.

The governors are beginning their state of the state addresses, which SSTI reviews every year for news from the states’ executives on innovation-related initiatives. Each year we bring you the governors’ own words from their speeches as they pertain to the innovation economy. In this first installment, we see education, workforce, and broadband initiatives from Idaho and Virginia, which is also proposing a new office for wind development, and West Virginia is turning to new uses for coal and a new investment fund.

Idaho

Taking a deeper dive into R&D expenditures at U.S. institutions of higher education, this week’s edition of Useful Stats examines the fields in which this R&D was performed at the metropolitan level in 2018.

The Clean Energy States Alliance (CESA) released a report detailing the benefits, obstacles and importance of working with under-resourced communities to facilitate access to solar energy. The report, Solar with Justice, provides a detailed set of recommendations for successfully providing solar technology to low- and moderate-income areas.

Voters on both coasts may be asked to approve funding this year to help combat the challenges of climate change. Governors in both New York and California are proposing measures to tackle environmental issues, with New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo launching a “Restore Mother Nature Act,” which his office is calling the nation’s most aggressive program for habitat restoration and flood reduction, and California Gov. Gavin Newsom is proposing a climate budget that would invest $12.5 billion over the next five years.

Governors are continuing to roll out their state of the state addresses and this week’s SSTI review highlights differences in the states economies: while Arizona is enjoying population growth Vermont is struggling to attract workers. More states are focusing proposals on climate change and clean energy initiatives, with New York proposing a $3 billion bond initiative to build resiliency, and Colorado, New Jersey and Vermont proposing clean energy and climate initiatives as well.  Rural broadband, higher education and workforce initiatives also are throughout the state addresses.

While states across the country are focusing more on clean energy and climate change, SSTI is happy to share an opportunity from one of our members. The Vermont Sustainable Jobs Fund, a Vermont based entrepreneurial support organization, announced the launch of the Delta Clime VT Energy 2020 business accelerator.

In 2021, U.S. microbusinesses reported $8.1 billion in research and development (R&D) expenditures, of which the microbusinesses themselves performed 75% ($6.1 billion) The $6.1 billion in microbusiness-performed R&D represents an increase of 9% over the prior year and 17% since 2019. Microbusinesses are those with nine or fewer employees.

The U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) announced the 2024 Growth Accelerator Fund Competition (GAFC) on January 8. The competition offers $50,000 to $200,000 in prize awards “for impactful and inclusive approaches to foster a thriving, collaborative national innovation support ecosystem to advance research and development (R&D) from ideas to impact.” The competition is not intended to provide capital directly to companies for R&D projects. The prizes will be awarded in two stages.

With the start of the new year, governors have begun to deliver their State of the State addresses, laying out proposals for new programs and discussing the conditions of their states. As states’ revenue levels return to more typical levels, lawmakers, with a few exceptions, are taking a more cautious, or constrained, view of their funding priorities and proposed initiatives.

Last week (Jan. 3), Maryland’s state comptroller released the state’s first State of the Economy report.

Since 1980, billion-dollar climate disasters in the United States have increased an astonishing 749%, from averaging 3.3 throughout the 1980s to 28 in 2023 alone. These data from the NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information include floods, wildfires, droughts, severe storms, tropical cyclones, and winter storms.

United States venture capital activity not unexpectedly slowed down in 2023, cooling off after multiple years of record-high deals and values during 2021 and 2022, according to the PitchBook-NVCS Venture Monitor Q4 2023. Pitchbook-NVCS estimates a total deal count of 15,766 (13,608 actual + 2,158 estimated) for 2023– exceeding the values of 2020 and prior years but falling several thousand short of the last two years.

NSF recently released updates on two ways of profiling trends in science and engineering at the state level: Science and Engineering State Profiles and Science & Engineering Indicators.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is already well integrated into the American workforce; in 2022, 19% of American workers were in jobs identified as most exposed to AI, compared to 23% in the least exposed jobs, according to a study by Pew Research. Jobs identified as most exposed are those in which the most critical responsibilities can either be replaced or assisted by AI.