US federal agencies that are funded above certain levels, like the National Institutes of Health, allocate part of those funds into programs to support small businesses, writes Sally Rockey, the deputy director for extramural research at NIH at her Rock Talk blog. In a recent post, she looks at the distribution of those grants across the US.
After normalizing the data to control for states with a larger population receiving more grants, she writes that the grants are, for the most part, spread evenly amongst the states. Massachusetts, though, stands out as having a high level of award dollars per person. "California and Massachusetts are known as large biotech hubs, but Massachusetts in particular is especially prominent in the map, due to its relatively small population in comparison to California (approximately 6.6 million versus 37.7 million, according to 2011 US Census estimates)," Rockey adds.