Overview

The National Science Foundation’s Technology, Innovation, and Partnership Directorate funded the Industries of Ideas project to produce new, timely, local, and actionable data and tools to document how regional investments in artificial intelligence (AI) are reshaping local economies and labor markets.  The results should help inform local policymakers about how to enhance or pivot investments in real time to meet the needs of their economies.

The work is a collaboration of three states (Ohio, New Jersey, and Arkansas), three universities (New York University, University of Michigan’s Institute for Research on Innovation and Science, and Ohio State University), and three national professional associations (the National Association of State Workforce Agencies, the Education Commission of the States, and the Center for Regional Economic Competitiveness). MDRC is one of the main implementers in the project.

The core insight is that emerging industries can at least partially be characterized by the new ideas generated by research funding. Early indicators of how those new ideas are being adopted — the innovations — can be characterized by the patterns of local employers hiring AI research talent out of local universities. Such indicators can serve to create local “headlights” into labor market changes.

MDRC’s role is to help operationalize this approach in the field. MDRC is:

• Developing measures of how employers are hiring AI talent.
• Characterizing the changes in the workforce — particularly the education structure — for those employers hiring AI talent
• Translating results into something state policymakers can act on by providing timely, local, and actionable information that can inform education and training offerings.

Two methodological workstreams give some ideas of what the collaboration has produced so far. One is developing automated ways of enhancing state wage record data with new information without burdening employers. A related work stream is establishing a scalable and reproducible hybrid large language model/human approach to scoring the elements of data quality, particularly focusing on whether data are “fit for purpose.”

This new approach to developing labor market intelligence requires a great deal of expertise and careful detail work. It requires stitching together university research data, state administrative records, and other private sector data under governance that holds up to scrutiny. The Industries of Ideas consortium exists to do that work and to share the methods openly.

Questions about Industries of Ideas? Contact: info@industriesofideas.ai

This material is based upon work supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation under Grant No 2518186. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.