By Guest Contributor John Warner | publisher of SwampFox
In the past decade, South Carolina invested $200 million that can drive prosperity in a way few people know about. The state’s investment in the SmartState program helped recruit more than 40 preeminent scholars to our research universities, which has attracted $1.2 billion in private dollars.
For example, four SmartState-endowed research chairs are at the core of Clemson University’s International Center for Automotive Research. They have attracted a strong faculty around them, which has attracted 200 of the world’s best engineering students. The SmartState program is a talent magnet for South Carolina.
Three years ago, I traveled to Israel with 17 of the SmartState researchers and a few other people. In recent decades, Israel has developed into the startup nation, with more startups per capita in Tel Aviv than anywhere in the world outside of Silicon Valley.
After the Soviet Union fell, a million Soviet and Eastern European Jews moved to Israel, which had a population of 6 million. The State of Israel created a system of 23 incubators where some of these immigrants could launch companies.
Like all startup efforts, the incubators themselves took several years to fire on all cylinders. In Misgav, Israel, I visited with The Trendlines Group, a private company that runs two of the Israeli incubators. The best way to describe Trendlines is as a startup factory. Michelin manufactures tires. Trendlines manufactures companies.
Trendlines focuses on life science companies in the medical technology and agritech fields. Since 2007, Trendlines has started and incubated 53 early‐stage companies, and expects to add eight to 10 new companies each year. Twelve portfolio companies have reached the “commercialization” stage and are generating revenues. There have been five exits in three years.
The power source for this amazing performance is Israeli universities. Israel and North Carolina both have populations of about 8- to- 9 million. North Carolina has Duke, NC State and UNC-Chapel Hill. Israel has three similar universities and five more like them. When I asked how Israel created its culture of education, the answer was, “What Jewish mother doesn’t want her son to be a doctor?” The hand that rocks the cradle is the hand that rules the world.
The SmartState program is the top of a deep bench of over 200 other strong South Carolina scholars holding endowed research chairs. In many cases, their research is also preeminent in its field, and they attract thousands of other strong faculty and students to the state.
Last spring, I was engaged to do a deep dive at Clemson to explore how to grow the university’s research enterprise and create more related startup companies. Most university incubators focus on helping coach faculty and students into being entrepreneurs, and that was the model I had in mind at the beginning of my project. Toward the end of the spring, I began meeting one-on-one with faculty to understand how to help them. I was joined in many of these meetings by Brian McSharry, the former COO of Sage Automotive Interiors.
One day, Brian and I met with Clemson bioengineering Ph.D. student Kayla Gainey and her professor, Delphine Dean, who has a Ph.D. from MIT in computer science and electrical engineering. Delphine is working with a group of students, led by Kayla, to develop Glucosense, an ultra-low-cost system for monitoring the glucose of diabetics in developing countries. Where market-leading test strips in the U.S. sell for a dollar, Glucosense test strips can be inkjet-printed on location in developing countries for a nickel. Diabetes is epidemic, with over 366 million diabetics worldwide. Many impoverished diabetics in developing countries are unable to monitor their disease due to the high cost, which can lead to horrific and expensive health consequences.
Blown away by the opportunity, I was explaining how I could help coach Delphine into starting a company when she said, “I’m not a business person and don’t want to be. You need science, you call me.”
She was very interested in being involved with an entrepreneurial company commercializing her research, because that it how it could get out of her lab to the people around the world who desperately need it. She was looking for a business partner to start and run the company. Brian and I have agreed with Delphine and Kayla to cofound Accessible Diagnostics, whose first product will be the Glucosense system.
Most faculty Brian and I met with said this is precisely what they wanted, too. They have chosen an academic career for a reason, and doing their research and educating their students are full-time jobs. That’s inspired us to research launching Concepts to Companies, a startup factory modeled on The Trendlines Group to partner with faculty and students with strong ideas who don’t have the experience or desire to start a company themselves.
Won’t it be cool if a decade from now, people are coming to South Carolina to study the startup culture here?
