Stories from America’s Industrial Policy Playbook: Designers and Outside Influencers

Planting the seeds with a summit

The writing was on the wall - the U.S. was going to be investing in the American Heartland, but not just for manufacturing, retail jobs, or infrastructure.  No, the U.S. was going to be investing in the Heartland for global innovation competitiveness.  This was brilliant, and still is.  One of the main things slowing the pace of progress for the U.S., over the past decade, has been our severely dense concentration of talent, capital, and startups in 2 locations on the Coasts (Silicon Valley and Boston).  Seeing the tea leaves - and that this wasn't just about balance, fairness, or equity, it was about national security and global competitiveness in our race to lead technology frontiers - I quickly formed a group of experts in innovation, intellectual property, and ecosystem development, and we put together the U.S. Innovation Competitiveness Summit in 2021 sponsored by UK Innovate, Columbia Technology Ventures, Association of University Technology Managers (AUTM), and, importantly, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).  We formed a week-long series of virtual panels, presentations, and talks advocating for place-based INNOVATION investments in the Heartland, federal investments in technology transfer, and the role of intellectual property policy in global innovation races.  This free Summit saw over 2,000 attendees from all over the country.  It was later used in the deliberations over the passing of the CHIPS and Science Act, as AUTM and other organizations advocated for its passage and purpose, using testimonials from the Summit and its prominent speakers from places like Kentucky, Wisconsin, Mississippi, and Arizona.  As Chair of AUTM that next year, we repeatedly used the national security talking points as we advocated for our nation to fund the unfunded mandate (technology transfer) for our first time since the Bayh-Dole Act -- which the CHIPS and Science Act did.

Advocating the bill

 I played a key role in advocating for the technology transfer capacity building authorizations in the CHIPS and Science Act, as I was the Chair-Elect and Chair of AUTM in 2021-2022.  I drafted parts of Section 10391 that eventually became part of the bill, including in particular the Collaborative Innovation Resource Center (see 10391(f)), modeled after the Kentucky Commercialization Ventures (KCV) program providing centralized technology transfer and research translation services to 7 comprehensive regional universities without such dedicated resources.  The CIRC program is intended to leverage the resources of R1 institutions to support regional ecosystem capacity for technology transfer, noting that "innovation happens everywhere, but commercialization happens only where it is resourced".  As the Chair of AUTM, I worked closely with staff of Senate Commerce Committee Chair Maria Cantwell and Ranking Member Roger Wicker on the language in 10391.  Those Senators truly had vision for the importance of technology transfer to our national security and global competitiveness, and the need to fund that unfunded mandate.  

See the following resulting comms around this work and the passing of the bill through that lens:

• AUTM congratulates congress - https://autm.net/about-autm/media/press-releases/autm-lauds-passage-of-chips-act,-urges-congress-to

• We also made sure to make it clear that our international allies were watching with great interest and lauded our move  - https://autm.net/about-tech-transfer/autm-insight/leadership-lens 

• Three months after the CHIPS and Science Act passed, I led an AUTM-WIPO International Leadership Summit, where the focal topic was "Government Funding of Technology Transfer".  It was a 2-day discussion with 40+ leaders from around the world representing 30+ countries.  We developed a summary takeaways white paper on the focal elements for government funding of technology transfer and its role in regional innovation ecosystem building.

Joining the National Advisory Council for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (NACIE) at Department of Commerce

As a member of the NACIE council formed in 2023, the year after the CHIPS and Science Act, we were not surprisingly tasked with supporting the design, development, and interrelationship between the Tech Hubs and Regional Innovation Engines program. We worked on various themes focused on regional innovation ecosystem building through these programs, including access to investment networks, supporting entrepreneurial talent development, collaborative technology transfer and university startup creation, and removing barriers to entrepreneurship in America's heartland regions. We published the "Competitiveness Through Entrepreneurship: A Strategy for U.S. Innovation" and presented it at the White House. Importantly, it expressly called for funding these regional innovation ecosystem building programs like Tech Hubs and Engines, and in designing them so that they would facilitate entrepreneurship and new small businesses through cutting edge deep tech initiatives.

The Catalytic Power of the “Science” Part of the CHIPS & Science Act on the NSF and Community College Pathways to Emerging Technology Industries

My program, the Future of Work and Innovation Economy initiative at the think-and-do-tank New America, specializes in research, storytelling, and technical assistance at the intersection of science, workforce, and industrial policies and their implementation in communities. We have been tracking the debate and discussions around the CHIPS & Science Act from its initial and earlier iterations at the end of the first Trump administration, through its ultimate bipartisan passage in 2022, and its implementation since that time. Simultaneously, we’ve specialized in studying and supporting community colleges’ workforce training in industrial policy implementation and the role of the sector in the implementation of CHIPS. My story contribution straddles this intersection.

Under the CHIPS & Science Act of 2022, the NSF created its first new directorate in over thirty years called the Technology, Innovation, and Partnerships (TIP) Directorate. The TIP directorate, with its three-prong mission of catalyzing applied R&D, technology development, and workforce development, effectively formalized the NSF’s role and value proposition to national industrial policy focused on science—and technology-based economic development.

These new intentional efforts at the NSF to better harness taxpayer-funded R&D activities to spark economic growth in underserved regions, create jobs, and catalyze advanced technologies critical to national security and competitiveness have been a healthy evolution for the agency for a variety of reasons. It was a substantial evolution of an agency that historically has primarily focused on funding fundamental research–a critical ingredient in the recipe to grow the American innovation economy, but one of several needed ingredients. Congress charged the TIP to help the NSF support a broader set of ingredients needed to achieve this lofty goal.

As Frank Lucas (R-OK), then chair of the US House of Representatives Committee on Space, Science, and Technology, has emphasized, it’s the “science” portion of the legislation that will be the engine of America’s economic development for decades to come.

An understated but exciting contribution of the CHIPS & Science Act was the enhancement of the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF)’s approach to supporting skilled technical workforce development for emerging technology industries, technology-based economic development, and industrial strategy. Its expanded support of community colleges has been especially noteworthy. While this evolution of the agency is still underway–and not without its growing pains–it’s worth taking stock of some of the developments to-date.

The NSF is not new to supporting skilled technical workforce education at community colleges. For example, for over thirty years, NSF’s Advanced Technological Education (ATE) program, authorized under the Scientific and Advanced Technology Act, has supported STEM and emerging technology workforce training in a wide range of areas. ATE has granted over 500 community colleges more than $1.5 billion since 1994. These programs are extraordinarily important. New America and the American Association of Community Colleges (AACC) recently celebrated the achievements of this program during a briefing on Capitol Hill, particularly as the NSF faces deep threats of funding cuts.

NSF’s STEM education directorate has supported community colleges through a range of other programs as well, such as the Community College Innovation Challenge or the Innovation in Two-Year College STEM Education program.

Despite operating with a fraction of the appropriated funding that Congress authorized under the CHIPS Act, the TIP directorate should be applauded for its approach to building on the successes of ATE and collaborating with the STEM education directorate to launch new programs. The STEM education directorate brings expertise around talent development, while the TIP directorate brings expertise around technology development and technology-based economic development.

The harmonization of those areas of expertise has brought exciting opportunities for the 2-year sector since TIP was created.

About a month after the launch of the TIP Directorate at SXSW 2022, I had the opportunity to conduct one of the first public interviews in April 2022 with Erwin Gianchandani, the inaugural head of the new TIP Directorate. During that conversation, he emphasized the importance of TIP prioritizing the alignment of emerging technology development with talent and workforce development, especially at America’s 1,000+ community colleges.

Since that time, NSF has walked the walk. As I later documented for the Chronicle of Higher Education, under the TIP directorate, new programs such as Enabling Partnerships to Increase Innovation Capacity (EPIIC) and Experiential Learning for Emerging and Novel Technologies (ExLENT) have actively contributed to the capacity-building of community college partnerships for emerging industries and technology-based economic development.

Most notably, TIP intentionally encouraged applicants to the historic Regional Innovation Engines program to think carefully about their skilled technical workforce strategy. The NSF Engines program represents one of the broadest investments in science- and technology-based economic development since President Lincoln signed the Morrill Act at the height of the Civil War. Then NSF Director Sethuraman “Panch” Panchanathan joined First Lady Biden, a community college professor herself, to announce NSF Engines at Forsyth Tech Community College in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

As InsideHigherEd reported in 2024, the Engines program represents a substantial moment of change for community colleges and the way they partner with universities, economic development organizations, workforce boards, states, high schools, labor unions, and a range of other partners around emerging technology workforce training. All the NSF Engines include community colleges as named partners, and while the difficult work of forming high-functioning partnerships across such a diverse array of tech-based economic development partners has not been easy, it was the TIP directorate that elevated community colleges to the highest level of visibility and strategy as it sought to implement the CHIPS Act.

I later hosted former NSF Director Panchanathan at New America for a public event focused on unpacking the education, workforce, and labor dimensions of the NSF Engines program. During the event, he reflected on the state of play of the community colleges within the Engines, affirming their centrality for meeting the skilled technical workforce needs of the emerging industries that Engines seeks to promulgate.

Our team at New America was so impressed with the work of the TIP directorate and NSF Engines that we felt compelled to support their efforts more formally. In September 2024, we launched with the NSF a first-of-its-kind national technical assistance program dedicated to supporting the community college partners in NSF Engines with capacity-building for emerging technology workforce development, technology-based economic development partnerships, and industrial strategy navigation.

Through our Accelerator for Community Colleges in the Innovation Economy, we have shifted from observers and researchers to on-the-ground partners of the community colleges navigating the complex matrix of partnerships and labor market needs the NSF Engines are facing. This experience has affirmed for us the need and the value proposition of the NSF as the right place to align technology and talent development, particularly as it relates to the skilled technical workforce.

As my colleague Matt Hourihan, then of the Federation of American Scientists, and I pointed out in an article for RealClearEducation, TIP's contributions further clarified why the NSF is such an important and worthy investment for Congress.

This story only captures a mere tip of what has transpired in the few years since CHIPS passed, even in the focused context of NSF’s support of community colleges. However, it’s my hope that future efforts that build on the Investing in America suite of bills can benefit from the learning journey that the agency and the TIP directorate have been on with respect to unlocking the full potential of community colleges in the innovation economy.