Columbia Regional Business Report

Startup center to be one-stop shop for entrepreneurs

By James T. Hammond 
jhammond@scbiznews.com  
Published April 27, 2012

Ron Loewen Don Herriott   Greg Hilton

A recent faculty boot camp for entrepreneurs at the University of South Carolina included three people from the School of Music, creating an “ah-ha” moment for Innovista  Partnerships Director Don Herriott.

 “I wouldn’t have predicted that,” said the former executive of the Roche chemical company. “The lesson was that entrepreneurship can spring from any discipline.”

 Herriott’s job is to help foster business startups at the university and in the community. To that end, he was instrumental in creating the Midlands Center for Entrepreneurial and Technological Innovation, or CETI, in collaboration with the USC/Columbia Technology Incubator .

 CETI’s objective will be to become a one-stop shop where entrepreneurs can be connected with resources in the community to help them start new businesses and achieve success.

 “I think we’ll see a lot of new businesses come out of physical sciences, but don’t be surprised if we see some startup companies come from other disciplines,” Herriott said.

Herriott has a personal goal for the local startup culture: within a generation to have at least one Fortune 500 company born, breed and headquartered in Columbia

Herriott has a personal goal for the local startup culture: within a generation to have at least one Fortune 500 company born, breed and headquartered in Columbia.

 Ron Loewen, Executive Director of the USC/Columbia Technology Incubator, said the region needs many more startup companies than are currently being produced.

“We’ve brought in seven extraordinary companies this year,” Loewen said. “Our internal commitment is to add 20 startup companies here each year.”

CETI will be housed at the Incubator on Laurel Street, with Greg Hilton as its executive director.

“We will do some things for entrepreneurs; we will be a referral service for others,” Hilton said.

The keys to a successful startup, he said, involve a few simple questions:

Does the business comprise a viable concept?

What are the customers, opportunities and barriers?

And do the business owners have the right mix of technology and business skills?

“A good technologist without a business person is half a loaf, and going nowhere,” Hilton said.

Herriott said CETI also will help people seeking to start businesses to find capital in the form of investors, loans or grants.

The investment community remains aloof from the start startup sector in Columbia, and that’s in part because there are so few startups, Hilton said.

“One view is that we don’t have enough venture-ready startups,” Hilton said.

Locating CETI at the incubator also made sense, Herriott said, representing a renewed engagement between the University and the Incubator.

“We are looking for companies with $10 million to $100 million in market potential,” Herriot said. Smaller startups are also good for the economy, he said, but Innovista and the Incubator need to focus on high-Impact companies.

“It’s a numbers game at the end of day, and we want bigger numbers,” Hilton said.

The Incubator has already three companies with more than $3 million a piece in annual sale, Herriott said.

“That’s a good start,” he said.

CETI will collaborate with one information sector that already has a promising startup system: Insurance Technology, Hilton said.

“We will collaborate with IT-ology and the USC College of Engineering and Computing,” he said, adding that the local insurance industry has already done a lot to provide entrepreneurial infrastructure.

“A year ago, there were no IT companies at 1301 Gervais street. Now there are nine companies and 200-plus IT employees,” Hilton said.

And, Herriott said, the SmartState endowed research chairs program has been a game-changer for the entrepreneurial sector in Columbia.

“They all have an eye toward commercial potential,” Herriot said. “They are changing the culture and they are attracting like-minded graduate students.”

One of the key characteristics of a successful startup is flexibility, Herriott said.

“Most successful entrepreneurs end up with a very different product than they started out with,” he said.

Reach James T. Hammond at 803-401-1094, ext. 201.