Published every two years, the OECD Science, Technology and Industry (STI) Scoreboard brings together internationally comparable indicators in the area.  The 2009 edition was recently published.  Read the English language summary.  One bullet point of likely interest:

• Historical data show that research and development (R&D) and venture capital are among the first expenditures to be cut during recessions in OECD countries. Preliminary data confirm this finding for the first half of 2009.

The Association of University Technology Managers (AUTM) will be having their annual meeting on March 18-20, 2010.  AUTM collects most of the standard metrics related to university technology transfer which are used in the United States.  Although the National Science Foundation has proposed beginning collection of some data in this area, that effort did not receive final approval in 2009. 

A couple of things which looked interesting to me on the AUTM annual meeting agenda:

• Session with the Despande Center, Lemuelson Foundation, and MIT Venture Mentoring.  These are great programs/organizations for practitioners looking to advance high-growth entrepreneurship.
• Session on data sharing among university and non-university partners. 
• Session on AUTM metrics.  This session looks to help integrate global AUTM metrics with local discussions of meaningful comparisons.

I was reminded last week of some work I had done a couple of months back which looked at COBRA health insurance.  The reminder came from a posting the Bureau of Economic Analysis did to clarify its treatment of COBRA payments in the national accounts. 

My earlier work was to comment on the Bureau of Labor Statistics' (BLS) Current Population Survey module on displaced workers.  I had earlier posted draft comments but received some great input from a colleague, Margo Quiriconi, on that draft so here are my final comments submitted to BLS.  What amazed me in reviewing this module was that in the midst of a national debate on health insurance and the Great Recession that BLS hadn't taken more care to revise the module.  Set to go to the field in January in the exact same form it was fielded two years ago no one seems to be worried about measuring really important aspects of health insurance in the displaced worker population like COBRA insurance or where people displaced from their job in this Great Recession are receiving their health insurance (if they are).  At this point, it is too late to change anything for this module, but it is, in my opinion, a real missed opportunity to collect relevant and meaningful information on an important population.  This could be a great module to someday finally answer the question about health care job lock by looking at people who are displaced but had access to health insurance through another source and whether that effects one way or the other their propensity to start a business. 

According to a new Intel/Newsweek survey, consumers remain confident in the role that innovation will play in driving future economic growth.  While this is survey I suspect knew the storyline that it wanted to tell before even going to the field, I did find some aspects of their survey about perceptions of future technological innovation to be interesting.  Here are a couple of paragraphs from their press release: 


We have asked a similar question before (not that that makes me any more confident in its predictive nature).  Think back to the perceptions created of Japan in the 1980s.  As such, I'd take this with a grain of salt.  Certainly media can influence attitudes significantly when it comes to a countries confidence.  But I can also recognize how self-fulfilling defeatists attitudes can become.  That is part of why we engaged in Global Entrepreneurship Week to try to positively affect the images and opportunities young people can find in entrepreneurship.  Perhaps next years theme should try to take on perceptions of our abilities to innovate technologically? 

The National Science Foundation has released new current and historical tabulations on bachelors and graduate degree completion by race/ethnicity/gender through 2006.  In scanning the report, the real movement over time appears in the graduate data with an ever increasing international component to degrees awarded.  Additionally, they have data out through 2008 on doctoral awards. 

The National Institute of Standards and Technology's (NST) Technology Innovation Program (TIP) has posted a call for comments on working papers which outline possible future areas of funding for its programs.  TIP is a very critical program in the U.S. portfolio of programs working to advance entrepreneurship and innovation. 

After the crazy financial environment of the last year, consumer finance (or household financial usage) surveys appear to be increasing in popularity or frequency.  The Federal Reserve Board of Governors made a really astute decision to refield their popular Survey of Consumer Finance, last done in 2007, but not to implement a new 2009 cohort but rather to go back to their respondents from 2007 and collected panel data on the finances of these households.  And apparently, they have added in some logic to their questionnaire such that if a respondent was a business owner in 2007 but not in 2009 they will ask what happened to that business.  This holds great potential in studing entrepreneurial households.  Unfortunately, the sample sizes here are so small that it the utility of the data could be limited depending on incidence rates.

Additionally, the World Bank is considering some expanded work in this area that if approved could be quite exciting.  Also from the World Bank, a recent paper highlights some methodological issues about collecting data on financial service usage:

Wanted to pass along a discussion of the Bureau of Labor Statistics Birth-Death Model and unemployment rate from Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis, not someone I normally follow, but this is quite helpful.

At the beginning of the year, I posted on data available on college-age entrepreneurial interests.  In writing that post I determined that I wanted to see something more on what the Cooperative Institutional Research Program (CIRP) at the University of California, Los Angeles had to offer related to entrepreneurship questions.  The result of this is a short paper which John Pryor and I released last week called "Trends in Business Interest Among U.S. College Students."  John did all the analysis work here but I helped to add in more context for entrepreneurship research since John doesn't have as much of an entrepreneurship research background. 

The 2008 U.S. Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) report was released this week from Babson and Baruch Colleges.  Showing significantly different trends from the Bureau of Labor Statistics data which was included for the U.S. in the report from Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) which I highlighted last week, GEM found increasing trends in "total entrepreneurial activity" in 2008.

For those of you not familiar with GEM, it is collected through a household survey in participating countries on activities related to nascent entrepreneurship - people in the process of starting a business - and people running young businesses.  In that sense, GEM is probably closest in measurement concepts to the Kauffman Index of Entrepreneurial Activity (KIEA).  GEM has the advantage of explicitly asking about activities related to nascent entrepreneurship while the KIEA takes advantage of a large-scale government survey to look at transitions from being employed by someone else to being self-employed or a business owner.  And while GEM reports to have a large enough sample size to disaggregate different types of growth trajectories, I don't believe it is really possible with a sample size of 2,000 for the whole United States.  Perhaps if they had a sample size which was twice its current size. 

It used to be that GEM was one of the first indicators to the hit the presses, making it of particular interest to the policy community since official statistics have historically been laggards.  But that is no longer the case.  Indeed, besides the Kauffman Index of Entrepreneurial Activity and the OECD reports, I know that the Census Bureau is getting very close to releasing its updated Business Dynamics Series through 2008 and the NETS database has 2008 data out (I'll be posting on that more in the next couple of days).  If GEM loses its timeliness factor and there continue to be concerns on the squishiness of the data it collects, then I fear the last legs of this effort might come off.  It is an effort with many merits, which is why we were involved as a funder for many years - don't get me wrong.  Being able to buy time on omnibus surveys can be very economical and as such I still know many researchers who utilize this function.