You Can't Buy a Biotech Cluster or I'll Take That Job for $1 Million!
A decade ago, South Florida embarked upon a quest to build a life sciences cluster. Their first act was to lure Scripps Research away from San Diego. Then, a few years, ago, they tried to lure Jackson Labs away from Maine. In between, the state of Florida and Palm Beach County have spent a combined $856 million to land Scripps and Germany's Max Plank Society. When these deals were being crafted, projections of over 44,000 jobs were bandied about. The actual numbers - 944 so far, 509 of them at Scripps, and two dozen biotech start-ups in the region. If you are doing the math, that's a little less than $ 1 million per job. MORE
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Now We Need an Industrial Ecosystem...
A new report on production in the innovation economy from MIT recently painted a challenging picture of the ecosystem when it comes to creating and sustaining production capabilities in the US. This report echoes the recent concern expressed by McKinsey about the separation of innovation and manufacturing capabilities, but goes further to bemoan the loss of local supply chains, local banking expertise, and local contractors. They suggest that renewing the production capacity in the US must be done by "rebuilding the industrial ecosystem with new capabilities that many firms of all kinds would draw on when they try to build their new ideas into products on the market." MORE
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Manufacturing Workers Are Knowledge Workers
There was near universal agreement among manufacturing managers in a recent Manpower survey that companies need to build their own workforce, especially if they want to take advantage of the trend toward insourcing. Most agreed that their workers were now "knowledge workers," using their skills to solve problems, improve processes and work with customers. Another big change is that manufacturing skills are increasingly computer skills, and are generally more sophisticated and complex. And while most felt that educational institutions needed to address these skills, the respondents also felt that connecting demand and supply for manufacturing talent requires a partnership of industry, education and governments. MORE
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Is Homegrown Talent Better?
A recent study suggests that foreign works brought in under the H1B program are not as good as the American workers they replace, and are paid lower wages, causing a "brain drain." The report concludes, "H-1B and related programs are not raising US Levels of talent and innovation in the tech fields, and are in some ways reducing them." The author, Dr. Norman Matloff, a Professor at the University of California, Davis, argues that immigration policy that causes the loss of America's "best and brightest" from science, technology, engineering and math programs should be reversed. MORE
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We Paid for It; Now We've Got It!
The White House issued a directive that intends to make research and digital scientific data funded by the federal government more accessible to the public. The directive compels agencies with more than $100 million in R&D expenditures to put together plans for making the results of federally funded R&D available to the public for free within 12 months after its initial publication.
This is designed to combat the current practice of most academic research being published through journals that are only available through university libraries that are able to pay the high fees. The general public generally does not have access to the published research except for brief abstracts.
Academic publishers who are hopeful that a reasonable policy will ultimately be crafted greeted this directive with measured enthusiasm, while open government activists cheered. MORE
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