It should be noted that annual R&D investments by businesses could show great variability and fluctuation across years. The result can move a state several relative positions in comparison to other states from one year to the next, pointing to a significant weakness in using rankings to measure a state’s performance and a reason why SSTI doesn’t recommend using many rankings for innovation benchmarking or TBED policy development. For example, the data suggests Alaska experienced an $878 million increase between 2016 and 2017, a 2,580 percent increase. With no readily apparent explanation in the BRDIS data released so far by NSF, Alaska is excluded from SSTI's analysis. Movement up and down the table below is most noticeable as state totals decrease, given the long tail distribution of the amounts.
For the full story: https://ssti.org/blog/useful-stats-business-rd-growing-more-concentrated-fewer-states?utm_source=SSTI+Weekly+Digest&utm_campaign=68ab554fa5-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2019_10_17_03_21&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_ecf5992d4c-68ab554fa5-220101229