Connect’s Innovation Report Highlights Higher Federal Spending

18 percent from the third quarter of 2008, with 32 local companies receiving $236 million, according to data from PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association. Funding for early stage ventures accounted for almost 70 percent of San Diego’s total.

The Connect list of top 10 investment deals, based on MoneyTree’s 3Q data:

Roka Bioscience $37.2 million

Zogenix   $36.0 million

Intellikine   $25.5 million

DriveCam  $19.0 million

Liquid Environmental Solutions $15 million

BeneChill  $10.0 million

Rayspan Corp.  $12.5 million

Achates Power  $12.1 million

Medsphere Systems  $12 million

Altain Therapeutics   $11 million

Some other data points from the Connect report:

—Mergers and acquisitions were up to 32 deals in San Diego during the third quarter, compared with 24 deals during the previous quarter.

—In San Diego, 791 patents were granted during the third quarter, a 14 percent increase compared to the previous quarter, when 691 patents were granted. San Diego accounted for 17 percent of the patents filed statewide during the quarter.

—Both average weekly wages and employment fell slightly in the third quarter, with the total number of employees at San Diego private research institutes amounting to about 30,000 people. Average weekly wage for these employees dropped to roughly $1,764.

Connect’s innovation report, which it developed in partnership with the National University Institute for Policy Research, UC San Diego Extension, PricewaterhouseCoopers, the Procopio, Cory, Hargreaves & Savitch law firm, and the San Diego Business Journal, is intended to serve as economic indicator of the health of San Diego’s innovation economy in San Diego.


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Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.