Next week’s ballot will ask voters whether they favor bonds for transportation projects and senior housing, which are both worthwhile. What voters haven’t been asked to approve for years are bonds to fund investments in research and development. Without this investment, Maine falls further behind on innovation and, as a result, job creation.
Maine’s investment in research and development has been stuck at 1 percent of state gross domestic product since 2011. This is a third of the national average and less than a quarter of the New England average. For the sixth year in a row, Maine’s insufficient R&D investment and lack of progress in boosting it earned a red flag in the annual Measures of Growth report from the Maine Development Foundation.
In addition, the goal of Maine spending 3 percent of its GDP on R&D, set for 2015 in the state’s 2010 Science and Technology Action Plan, has been continually pushed forward. The target year in the Maine Development Foundation report is now 2020.
Eighty percent of economic growth comes from innovation, the foundation notes in its report. Innovation — the development of new products, new ways to make them and new markets in which to sell them — creates new industries and new jobs, often well paying.
With so much economic growth dependent on innovation, Maine’s economy will surely continue to lag in the absence of concerted, significant investment to promote it.
In 1997, Maine ranked 51st — behind Puerto Rico — for its investment in university research and development. That became a rallying cry for a more cohesive approach to and more state money for R&D, both at educational institutions and private and nonprofit facilities. In addition to the money, the state undertook a concerted effort to build the state’s capacity to do this work by improving laboratories and developing plans to grow the state’s innovation capacity.
The next year, voters approved a $20 million bond to support this work, the start of a series of bonds that included R&D as a key component.
Voters approved a $35 million bond focused on job creation and R&D in 2002. Just a year later, they signed off on a $60 million state borrowing package, with $15 million earmarked for research at the University of Maine and the University of Southern Maine. In 2005, voters approved a $20 million bond with $3 million earmarked to renovate laboratories at the University of Maine. A separate $8.9 million bond for environmental and agricultural work also passed.
In 2007, voters approved a $50 million bond to support research into and commercialization of products and services in seven areas identified by the Legislature, including biotechnology, composites and precision manufacturing. In 2010, an $11 million bond aimed at creating jobs through investment in offshore wind energy gained voter support.
Gov. Paul LePage vetoed a $20 million R&D bond in 2012, saying the money should come out of the state budget instead. He also criticized past R&D efforts for focusing too heavily on public-sector research and not private industry.
But the bond he vetoed would have supported private-sector R&D. The Maine Technology Asset Fund, administered by the Maine Technology Institute, was created in 2007. Since then, it has pledged more than $50 million, much of that money from the bonds approved by voters, to projects that emphasize university-industry partnerships, attract significant matching funds to multiply the effect of the state’s investment, and hold the potential to make a major economic impact.
According to a 2011 evaluation of Maine’s research and development investments, 29 projects that had received funding by mid-2011 had directly created 289.5 jobs and preserved 303 more.
Not only has the bond money stopped, but this “deliberate approach” that emphasized public-private collaboration and rigorous review of investments has “broken down,” says Jim Damicis of Camoin Associates, who has evaluated the state’s R&D investment efforts on behalf of the state, the Maine Development Foundation and others. As a result, the state effectively leaves federal research dollars on the table and misses out on the creation of high-wage jobs. Most important, the state has neglected the work necessary to plant the seeds that could grow into tomorrow’s job-creating industries.
So, while we support the senior housing and transportation bonds on the Nov. 3 ballot, we lament the absence — again — of a bond package that devotes needed investment to innovation in Maine.
