Research Triangle Among Inc. Mag's Best Places to Start a Business

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The three-cornered Research Triangle is also among America’s top-three places to start a business.

That’s the conclusion of the newly published winter 2018 edition of Inc. magazine, on newsstands now.

Though the publication pinned the award on the Triangle, Inc. simplified the designation of the renowned Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill hub by calling it Raleigh. It lauded the Triangle as #3 among America’s 50 “Surge Cities” for its renowned workforce talent.

Austin took the #1 spot in the rankings, and Salt Lake City was #2.

“Surprise: This Southern Hub Might Have the Best Talent Pipeline in Tech,” says the headline over staff writer Kevin Ryan’s article about the Triangle. The subhead: “North Carolina is home to a bustling epicenter for tech startups, brainy talent, and killer barbecue.”

Ryan spent time interviewing business, academic and tech leaders throughout the Triangle, highlighting the hot spots and selectively dropping names of people, institutions, places and companies as examples of what we, who live and work here, know and love about it.

Staff shot of bioMASON
bioMASON, led by Ginger Dosier (front center, in black) is an example of the fast-growing
RTP life science sector Inc. calls one of the best places to start a company.
 -- bioMASON photo

Among those highlighted in the Triangle story is Ginger Dosier, co-founder and CEO of bioMASON, an RTP “green tech” company that got its start with the help of a $50,000 loan and initial U.S. office space via the North Carolina Biotechnology Center.

The company uses the tools of biotechnology, in this case a harmless bacterium, to develop a masonry material at room temperature that replaces traditional clay and concrete without the high energy consumption associated with standard manufacturing.

Charlotte took the 22nd best slot for business start-ups, the only other North Carolina city on the list.

To compile the new Surge Cities Index, Inc. said it joined with innovation policy company Startup Genome to crunch the data to score and rank the top 50 metro areas in the U.S. on seven key indicators, from early-stage funding deals per 100,000 adults to job creation. Besides those two categories, the evaluations were also based on these:

  • Rate of entrepreneurship
  • High-growth company density
  • Population growth
  • Net business creation
  • Wage growth

Ryan noted that the Triangle “boasts the fourth-most-educated population in the country, ahead of San Francisco, according to personal finance firm WalletHub. Forty-seven percent of the local talent pool holds a bachelor's degree or higher, and many are from well-regarded local universities Duke, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and NC State. These schools all offer strong engineering and computer science programs, so the startup scene is software heavy."

Ryan also noted that North Carolina companies raised $1.1 billion in 2017, "up 36 percent from the previous year.”

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