Celebrating the State's Success

OPINION

Our challenge

One sweltering day this past June, Tesla quietly opened its new Southeast parts distribution center in Fountain Inn. Only about 15 jobs were created, so it didn’t make front-page news.

The site is centrally located between Charlotte and Atlanta, within three hours of a $1 trillion economy with 15 million residents and some of the world’s most advanced manufacturing and logistics facilities.

Inside this modest economic development victory is a bold challenge I posted on LinkedIn.

Someone in South Carolina has relationships at Tesla. We have a graduate engineering school at CU-ICAR (the Clemson University International Center for Automotive Research). Most graduates leave the state to find jobs. How do we get Tesla to open an innovation center in South Carolina to employ CU-ICAR graduates and build strong relationships with the faculty? Tesla is one of the top employers of CU-ICAR graduates. They already know the quality of the students.

Among the many professionals who “liked” the post were CU-ICAR students and graduates, including Ruturaj Mane, a 2022 CU-ICAR graduate who is now a manufacturing engineer at Tesla in Fremont, California, and about a dozen other CU-ICAR alumni employed mostly in California, Michigan, and Texas. Many of these students and graduates would stay in South Carolina if they could find jobs here.

Our talent exodus

Despite some economic successes, most graduates with advanced degrees in science and engineering from Clemson and the University of South Carolina leave the state to find jobs elsewhere. At the same time, we’re experiencing diminishing returns on traditional economic development incentives. The Fox Hill Business Park, where Tesla’s distribution center with about 15 jobs is located, received a cut in its property tax rate from 10.5 percent to 6 percent over 30 years. A recently announced Spartanburg data center with about 27 jobs will receive $70 million in tax credits over 40 years, or roughly $2.6 million per job.

When asked about incentives in an interview in the SC Economic Development Guide 2025, Gov. Henry McMaster said, “The main incentive is people. Another incentive is our technical college system.” While our technical colleges are excellent, the governor didn’t mention research universities, which isn’t an oversight. Universities aren’t central to the state’s focus on attracting manufacturing giants like BMW, Michelin, and GE. Yet just miles from Tesla’s new distribution center, CU-ICAR trains world-class automotive engineers, only to see them leave South Carolina when they graduate to drive innovation elsewhere. This disconnect is our low-hanging fruit, ripe for harvesting.

Our untapped potential

CU-ICAR’s global reputation was on full display in June at the Society of Manufacturing Engineers’ North American Manufacturing Research Conference, co-located in Greenville with the American Society of Mechanical Engineers International Manufacturing Science and Engineering Conference. The events drew 800 manufacturing researchers, industry experts, and government partners from around the world, showcasing CU-ICAR’s global reputation for academic excellence. These events are reminiscent of the Southern Textile Exposition held when Greenville could promote itself as "Textile Capital of the World.”

Yet, this brilliance underscores unrealized economic potential. As we have done before, we can leverage conferences like these to build relationships that attract innovation centers and headquarters from companies like Tesla to tap into our talent pipeline. We can also foster an ecosystem with capital and support for entrepreneurs to develop manufacturing and logistics tools for our world-class facilities. Both paths — corporate investment and entrepreneurial growth — can help attract and retain top talent, turning academic excellence into economic impact.

Our gold rush

I produced the 2023 InnoVenture Futures Festival in Greenville, including leaders from Bosch, ZF, BMW, KEMET, Sonoco, CU-ICAR, Clemson Bioengineering, and others. Follow-up discussions explored where we have a global reputation as best-in-class from Munich to Taipei. We concluded we are seen as world leaders in “making and moving things,” from automobiles to tires, F-16s, gas turbines, refrigerators, and medical devices. This is validated by the California company Figure’s first deployment of its leading humanoid robots at BMW Manufacturing in Spartanburg, and by the U.S. Army’s investment of up to $100 million at CU-ICAR to create tools to develop autonomous off-road vehicles.

During the 19th-century California Gold Rush, while a few miners struck gold, fortunes were made by merchants like Levi Strauss and Samuel Brannan, who supplied miners with blue jeans, picks, and shovels. Fortunes can be made by selling the manufacturing and logistics tools supporting the daily choreography of materials and products flowing through the Upstate’s best-in-class manufacturing facilities and supply chains.

Our call to action

South Carolina’s manufacturing legacy is a solid gold asset, with a global reputation for some of the world’s most advanced manufacturing and logistics operations in our backyard. That’s a good thing. Collectively, our corporate professionals, economic developers, and academic researchers have a staggering array of global relationships. That’s a great thing.

Let’s form a leadership group to craft an enhanced economic development strategy. This group should include executives from global corporations with facilities here, regional economic development leaders, academic leaders, and entrepreneurs. The common objective is to enhance the Upstate’s innovation reputation among our global relationships to drive two key metrics: increasing investments in innovation centers and corporate headquarters from manufacturing and logistics companies, and increasing investments in entrepreneurial companies that provide advanced manufacturing and logistics innovations to those companies.

Each member of the leadership group will need to drive metrics that are in their enlightened self-interest. Corporate partners need increased efficiency and cost reduction. Economic developers need to report capital investment and jobs. Academics need increased sponsored research. That’s OK. It’s the common metrics that pull us together to increase high-quality jobs, especially for those with advanced degrees in science and engineering. If that is happening, most other things we are doing are going right.

I’ve been doing innovation here for over 40 years. I know that unless we proactively resist it, the organizational antibodies will attack our collaboration as competition. The purpose is not to replicate any existing capability, but to build on our collective capabilities and relationships in a way no individual organization can on its own. How do economic developers tap into global corporate and academic relationships to attract capital investment and jobs in innovation centers and headquarters? How do corporations support capital invested in entrepreneurial companies to develop technologies that increase efficiency and reduce costs? How do academics benefit from developing the innovation ecosystem to gain support from our federal and state elected officials to grow sponsored research that produces the pipeline of top talent corporations need?

We can build on our world-class advanced manufacturing and logistics foundation, developed since World War II, to grow our global reputation for innovation and entrepreneurship in manufacturing and logistics innovations. Perhaps we combine our global relationships to create the modern equivalent of the Southern Textile Exposition to promote the Upstate as a world leader of manufacturing and logistics innovations. We use that to attract innovation centers and headquarters and to grow entrepreneurial companies with game-changing innovations. The potential is immense. We have all the puzzle pieces in front of us. By acting now, we can kick our economy into higher orbit. Join us in making this bold, aspirational vision a reality.

John Warner is founder and CEO of InnoVenture. He can be reached at JohnWarner@innoventure.com.