Entrepreneurial & Business Environment Entrepreneurial & Business Environment

• Since the 2017 Competitiveness Report, we’ve seen big increases in the proportion of business services (such as accounting and legal) employment a key indicator of a healthy overall business environment. This growth has been a primary driver for Columbia’s improvement in this index.

• Over a long horizon, we’ve been among the top group of our peers in overall growth of business establishments. While that’s closely tied to overall population growth, it’s also an indicator of dynamism at a time when entrepreneurship rates are dropping nationally.

Small Business Activity: Measure of a region’s capacity to produce

• Despite our success in this index, our region is losing headquarters - at least seven in the past 18 months and nationally, corporate relocations are trending towards a few select major metros. These economic cornerstones and their employees play a critical role in attracting talent from outside the region, and are often primary sources of philanthropic activity, meaning their loss presents a long-term threat to the region.

Business Density: Number of establishments per 1,000 employees

Opportunity Brag Inspiration

Business Services: Share of population employed in professional and technical services occupations

Lexington County-based Diesel Laptops, a developer of diagnostic software and equipment for the trucking and off-highway diesel markets, was one of the Southeast’s fastest-growing companies in the 2018 Inc. 5000 rankings. Founded in 2013 and now employing over 100 full-time workers, the company took advantage of an opportunity to enhance efficiency within South Carolina’s robust logistics sector by creating time-saving products.

Innovation Strategy in Raleigh

Raleigh, NC, has long leveraged the region’s leading universities and highly-targeted recruitment efforts to build strong technology and life sciences sectors. By connecting the dots between ideas, capital and talent, the Raleigh MSA supports growing small businesses in high-tech areas. As a result, startup activity is extremely high, with a Brookings Institute study finding 171 Inc. 5000 companies per million residents. Innovate Raleigh was created in an effort to expand a strong ecosystem by acting as a central node for entrepreneurs and innovators in the region.

Columbia’s greatest growth opportunity lies in building strong companies from within. While Columbia performs comparably to our peers in the number of Inc. 5000 companies, we lag well behind the fastest-growing of those: Raleigh, Charleston and Greenville. GrowCo, an organization whose goal is to triple the number of Columbia-based Inc. 5000 companies in the next three years, is an opportunity for the region to purposefully support successful companies by providing critical services such as founder mentoring, entrepreneurship-focused regional marketing and talent attraction.

Establishment Growth Rate: Growth in number of business establishments, 2000-2016

+1,188% 3 YEAR GROWTH

The University of South Carolina is now deploying a similar talent-based strategy: since the strategy’s founding in 2013, its work has generated over $790M in economic impact, attracting companies such as IBM, Siemens, Samsung and Boeing to the state.

Source | Brookings Institute, University of South Carolina Office of Research

Columbia-based Inc. 5000 Companies