by Bradley Parsons
Staff Writer
Nestled among three central North Carolina college towns sits Research Triangle Park. The public/private technology cooperative has grown from a few thousand empty acres of forested land in 1957 to 5 million square feet of research and lab facilities and a business incubator with a roster of graduates that reads like a Nasdaq who’s who.
RTP practices a different kind of economic development. It’s not business recruiting or retention, it’s business creation. Rather than lobbing development incentives at existing companies, RTP provides an environment where nascent businesses can thrive. Across the country, economic developers are taking notice of what’s going on at RTP. It’s no different in Jacksonville where Enterprise North Florida has made the facility a model for what it hopes to become.
“They’re what Enterprise North Florida wants to be when we grow up,” Enterprise president and CEO Al Rossiter told a JEDC advisory committee Wednesday. “It’s a spectacular organization and an absolute magnet for startups.”
In today’s economy, entrepreneurship has become a vital component of economic growth, said Rossiter. A study cited by the NGA Center for Best Practices showed entrepreneurial activity accounts for almost 70 percent of economic growth.
“Entrepreneurs ultimately propel the country’s largest businesses: they do not just run small companies,” said a paper prepared by NGA that Rossiter distributed to the JEDC committee. The paper said 35 percent of the companies in the Fortune 500 are displaced every few years by rapidly expanding firms.
Rossiter said it was crucial that the City expand its presence in the churning economy.
With the right blend of public and private help, Rossiter said Enterprise’s own Technology Enterprise Center could duplicate a measure of RTP’s success. He said the City could best support startups by helping to build a network to connect entrepreneurs with private investors.
“There’s no directories for venture capitalists. You can drive down Ponte Vedra Boulevard and you know there’s money there, but you don’t know where the investors are,” he said.
Beyond providing connectivity and some capital, Rossiter said he would prefer that the JEDC and the Technology Enterprise Center continue to work separately. JEDC executive director Kirk Wendland agreed.
“I would advocate that we continue to support it, but not that we set up our own business incubator. The failure rate for new businesses is too high,” said Wendland.
An increased focus on creating business shouldn’t come at the expense of more traditional economic development, according to the NGA. Its report said incentive–based recruiting and investment in infrastructure and the labor force still are necessary to create a competitive business climate.
But these programs are no longer sufficient on their own, the report reads. Instead they have become an “expected base line rather than a competitive advantage.”