NEXT in Greenville ramps up effort to grow technology sector

The Greenville Chamber of Commerce is restructuring NEXT, a 14-year-old subsidiary started to support entrepreneurs, to include the city and county of Greenville and Furman University.

NEXT has supported 110 companies, including 28 that are minority led, and has raised $50 million in capital. In all, the companies employ 1,400 workers at an average of one and a half times the salaries of Greenville workers, said NEXT board chair Scott Millwood.

“It’s working,” he said. “We just want to pour more gas on the fire.”

The city and council will bring funding as well as their expertise in marketing and economic development while Furman has had success with its Institute for Innovation and Entrepreneurship that has tapped into students’ talent and curiosity to grow their own businesses.

“Furman is a surprising partner,” said Furman President Elizabeth Davis. “We don’t have an engineering school, a business school but innovation is about ideas, curiosity.”

The entrepreneur office was developed when school leaders saw an underground group of students working on their own projects, she said.

Earlier this year the university staged a virtual pitch day that drew 100 students and 530 attendees from all over the country, said Anthony Herrera, the executive director.

Furman’s institute and the city of Greenville’s Economic Development Department will move into the NEXT on Main facility in the Bank of America building in downtown Greenville.

Millwood called the new partnership’s plan going forward 3X Next to “amp up the programs we are now running.” NEXT provides working space, mentoring and access to capital investment.

A full-time chief operating officer will be hired and a branding effort will be started to market their successes, he said.

Millwood said Greenville is young in the technology field compared to heavyweights like the Research Triangle in North Carolina and Silicon Valley in California, both of which have decades of work behind them.

But he pointed to Greenville’s strengths of quality of life, venture capital and good weather as aiding in attracting quite a few innovators already, including several life science businesses, a media company and those involved in advanced manufacturing.

Merle Johnson, the city’s economic development director, said, “It wasn’t too long ago Greenville was the textile capital of the world. This is another step.”