Friday, Nov. 13, 2009

Group emphasizing four industries

With turbulent economic times challenging the nation and the state, an Upstate organization today will call for more emphasis on four industries, including automotive and biosciences, to identify new regional opportunities for economic development.

The Upstate South Carolina Alliance has determined the best opportunities also lie within advanced materials industries, such as metal fabrication and advanced textiles, and energy operations, including nuclear, wind and solar components.

"We're in an economic crisis," said Hal Johnson, president and chief executive officer of the alliance, a public-private organization created to market the 10-county Upstate region. "People want jobs. Job markets are changing. We're basically competing for less projects with more communities."

Across the nation, there are "well over 6,000 economic development organizations that are out there, and every one of our counties, every one of our cities, our regions" compete against those groups for jobs "and that's just in the U.S.," Johnson said.

"In Asia, they're pumping the dollars into economic development and marketing and very specific targeted recruitment," he told editors and reporters from The Greenville News.

As a result, the Upstate must retool its approach to marketing the region to business and industry, Johnson said.

"We really have to understand how we're going to differentiate our region from the rest of them," he said. "In today's world, we've got to be more creative. We've got to change the way we think, we focus. We're going to have to leverage resources more in the coming years than we've ever done before."

Central to the local effort's success will be collaboration with Clemson University, which has its International Center for Automotive Research in Greenville, and a commitment to a unified message by business, education and public sector representatives, Johnson said.

Alliance officials today are scheduled to unveil results of a study begun in May to identify the region's business and research strengths. They then plan to outline a marketing strategy to raise awareness of the Upstate, with the ultimate goal of generating new investment, jobs and higher wages.

To fully implement the strategy, "a significant amount of money" will have to be raised from public and private sources, Johnson said. The alliance's 2010 budget, about two-thirds of which will come from the private sector, will allow the group to get started, but only cover a portion of the initial costs, he said.

The campaign, to be announced at Tri-County Technical College in Pendleton, will target:

- Advanced materials, including optoelectronics and photonics and possible military applications. Within the industry, alliance officials also want to pursue plastics operations, including injection molding; metals components, including titanium applications; and fabrics and fibers, including headquarters of companies that can't move operations offshore due to security reasons.

- Automotive, including suppliers; so-called boutique original equipment manufacturers of parts and accessories; and companies specializing in power train mechanisms and onboard electronics.

- Biosciences, including medical devices, contract research and development efforts and biomaterial operations, including tissue regeneration.

- Energy, including blades and generator bearings for wind operations; nuclear components such as instrument valves; and systems solutions such as grid components, embedded sensors and automated metering devices.

Within each targeted group, there will be specific marketing activities, including more participation in industry events and hosting some of those events in the Upstate, Johnson said.

The officials say that as part of the overall marketing strategy, they want to create research libraries, maps and databases of relevant county and targeted-industry materials.

Johnson said the study began with a consulting team traveling throughout the region and spending a day in each of the 10 counties represented by the alliance. While visiting, the consultants reviewed which companies had existing operations, and they investigated the strengths and weaknesses of each area, Johnson said.

The study's second phase focused on developing a strategy to seek out the targeted industries, and determining the steps needed to attract them.

South Carolina's unemployment rate was 11.6 percent in September, the latest month for which figures were available from state officials.

In the Upstate Alliance's region of Abbeville, Anderson, Cherokee, Greenville, Greenwood, Laurens, Oconee, Pickens, Spartanburg and Union counties, the jobless rate exceeded 10 percent and, in Union's case, ran as high as 20.6 percent.

Jerry Howard, president and CEO of the Greenville Area Development Corp., the county's economic development arm, said the marketing campaign must reflect a regional branding approach.

"There's a bigger proposition, or value proposition, for Greenville County than how many projects we're seeing out of the alliance," he said.

Johnson agreed.

"What makes Greenville County happy might not make Union County happy," he said. "And so we've got to find a way to balance that."

To develop its strategy, the Upstate Alliance partnered with national consultants from Avalanche Consulting Inc., McCallum Sweeney Consulting, and Greyhill Advisors.

It also had support from South Carolina Power Team, an economic development alliance of the state-owned electric utility Santee Cooper and the state's 20 electric cooperatives, and AdvanceSC, a limited liability company established by Duke Energy in 2004 to support communities in Duke Energy's South Carolina service area through grants for public assistance and economic development programs.

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