NSF WILL FUND REGIONAL “INNOVATION ENGINES”

A new National Science Foundation program will fund “innovation engines” in parts of the U.S. that now lack the kind of development and commercialization infrastructure that defines Silicon Valley, Boston’s Route 128, and Raleigh’s Research Triangle Park.

“We spin out a dozen companies a year,” vice-chancellor Evan Facher at the University of Pittsburgh told Science News, “but they don’t stay. They go to Boston or San Francisco because we can’t nurture them.”

The first tranche of the NSF’s new program will share $160 million over 10 years among five regional centers that meet a fairly narrow set of criteria:

• the region must have at least one university that already receives a steady stream of federal research grants;
• the university needs to demonstrate a culture that encourages researchers to “think like entrepreneurs” when they create or discover something that could become a commercial product;
• the area needs to have a community of business experts, funders, and talent able to bring a discovery from lab to product;
• the region also must have a skilled labor force and cadre of technological companies ready to turn those products into commercial successes.

Projects also must focus on research “driven by societal or economic challenges” and reflect the “needs, capabilities, and applications” of the local economy, the NSF said.

Early next year, the foundation will allot 50 grants of $1 million each to regions that want to craft proposals that will earn them a piece of the $160-million pie.

TRENDPOST: The new NSF program is similar to the U.S. commerce department’s billion-dollar plan to fund “regional industry clusters” that has given 60 planning grants to communities nationwide.

Those first-round winners are now competing for 24 grants of as much as $100 million each.

It will take years for these seeds being planted now to blossom into a renewed U.S. techno-industrial sector, but planting is essential if you’re going to have a harvest—in this case, the harvest being a next-generation, competitive, technology-driven economy.