Late in 2008, CCST completed the last of several contributions to a workforce development project funded by a $15 million U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) initiative, the Workforce Innovation in Regional Economic Development (WIRED). The DOL initiative is part of an ongoing focus at the federal level on the United States' economic competitiveness in the areas of science and technology. This stems in part from the National Innovation Initiative launched in 2003 by the Council on Competitiveness, and has been reinforced by warnings in reports such as the National Academies' 2005 report, Rising Above the Gathering Storm. The coalition, led by the California Space Authority, encompassed over 60 partners, including regional organizations such as the Bay Area Science and Innovation Consortium and private companies such as Boeing and Lockheed Martin, and NASA.

One of the projects CCST completed was an innovative website designed to make a wide range of workfore related materials available to Workforce Investment Boards (WIBs). The website WIB toolkit, Racing for the Future (www.wibtoolkit.net), unveiled in June 2008, includes a variety of materials designed to assist WIB partners in addressing workforce needs. The resources in the toolkit include examples of roles that WIBs can play to respond to local workforce needs, case studies of successful partnerships that WIBs can emulate, and overviews of key high-tech industries including nanotechnology, advanced manufacturing, biotechnology, and information technology related to transportation. It also contains analyses of economic trends in California. The toolkit is organized to facilitate rapid access to each of its principal categories of information, with extensive links to other parts of the toolkit and related resources elsewhere on the web. It also contains a library of documents for download, including eleven briefs and reports prepared exclusively for the toolkit.

A second output from this project was the report, Overview of California State- Funded R&D, 2004-2007: Understanding the State's Role in Shaping R&D Spending, released in November 2008, which provides a snapshot of R&D spending by the state government. The report in part provides an update to CCST's 1999 analysis of California state R&D funding, carried out as a component of the California Report on the Environment for Science and Technology (CREST). The new study found that total state government and R&D expenditures in FY 2006 were approximately $347 million, not counting the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM), which had not yet begun to fund R&D at the time.

The estimated total represents only a modest fraction of total R&D activity in the state - approximately one half of one percent of the estimated $63.9 billion total R&D in 2006. However, state investment is an effective way of focusing industry and federal R&D investment in areas of interest to the state, often bringing in matching funds at a rate of 2 to 1. Hence, California state government spending was judged to have a substantial impact on the focus and direction of overall R&D expenditures in the state.