State Government Data

Title: State Government Experimentation Dataset (SGE): U.S. State-Led Technology-Based Economic Development (TBED) Policies, 2000 – 2015

Citation: Armanios, D. E.; Lanahan, L.; Yu, D. X year. “Varieties of Local Government Experimentation: U.S. State-led Technology-Based Economic Development Policies, 2000 – 2015.” Academy of Management Discoveries, 2019. (Armanios & Lanahan equal first authors).

Abstract: A recent understudied phenomenon has emerged whereby public institutions are collectively taking on an expanded role in technological innovation by offering resource, policy, and infrastructure support even when the trajectories of these technologies are unclear. We term this phenomenon as government experimentation. Scholarship has tended to examine national efforts, yet local governments are in an ideal position to tailor programs to the local market context given their proximity. Nevertheless, we have a limited understanding regarding how local institutions experiment. The aims of this paper are twofold. First, we outline our methodological approach for building a unique dataset that classifies the portfolio of U.S. state government technology-based economic development policies from 2000-2015. We turn to the State Science and Technology Institute as the primary data source. Among the set of 1,659 state-led actions, we classify the context, topic, and lever. Second, we offer descriptive and comparative analysis of this local government experimentation. In considering the spread of each state’s policy portfolio, we highlight four distinct experimental archetypes – hub specialists, public entrepreneurs, industry architects, and ecosystem designers. Finally, we consider theoretical, managerial, policy, and methodological implications that could be derived from our characterization of this phenomenon of local government experimentation.

Brief Dataset Description:

• Original dataset of 1,744 state-led actions as scraped with permission from the State Science and Technology Institute’s “Weekly Digest”.
• State-led actions classified by:
• Institutional Context: Higher Education, Secondary Education, Industry, Non-profit, Public Agency, Partnership
• TBED Topic: Human Capital, Innovation, Physical Infrastructure
• Policy Lever: Programmatic, Investment, Divestment, and Tax

For complete construction process of the dataset, see Armanios, Lanahan, Yu, 2019 and the following Appendix (download icon for Appendix as a PDF).

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SGE Raw Dataset

All 1,744 state-led actions – as with Armanios, Lanahan, Yu, 2019, we strongly recommend to use actions from 2000-2015 (N=1,659 state actions). The reason is that from 1996-1999, SSTI officials noted they were still calibrating their mechanisms for capturing novel TBED experimentation. Actions after 2015 are also less complete as they were near the time when we scraped the data. That said in case a researcher wants to follow-up on state actions prior to 2000 (beginning in 1996 when the Digest began) or after 2015 (we scraped up to 2017), we make those available in this raw dataset. We also provide the relevant article title and link from each state action in case other researchers would like to try out their own coding schemes for characterizing government experimentation.  

Economic Indicators dataset

Publicly-available data aggregated by state-year of gross state product per capita (Bureau of Economic Analysis - BEA), high-tech firm births (U.S. Census Survey of U.S. Business Statistics – SUSB; only up to 2014 during our window of analysis); and annual patents (U.S. Patent and Trademark Office – USPTO)