Change Papers: A shared effort to change North Carolina's climate for innovation.

A pretty big tree just fell in the forest of innovation in North Carolina. It’s not clear that a whole lot of people heard.

In the crowded showroom of a restaurant supply business in Raleigh last Wednesday, Gov. Bev Perdue announced she was naming Scott Daugherty, head of UNC’s NC State-housed  Small Business and Technology Development Center (SBTDC), the first-ever “Commissioner of Small Business,” and George Millsaps, head of the NC Community College System’s Small Business Center Network (SBCN), as “Assistant Commissioner.” The move was greeted with three sentences of coverage in the local paper.

Blahblahblahyawn.  More bureaucracy, right, when what we really need is to find ways to turn innovative small businesses loose?

This one is different. For one thing, there’s no money being spent. Daugherty remains head of the SBTDC; Millsaps stays in his job as head of the Small Business Center Network. They take on these tasks in addition to their day jobs.

Second, it gives the state, for the first time, a coordination function for small business efforts in the state.  No new bureaucracy: instead it is making sure the resources we have really work together.

It’s not that we lack public and private agencies and organizations that can help.  We have folks in the SBTDC, who generally work with fast-growing or technology-driven businesses,  and the people at the 58 Small Business Centers on community college campuses, who generally work with smaller, community-based small businesses. We have the existing business employees at the state Department of Commerce, their Business ServiCenter, and the electronic portal Business Link NC (BLNC). We have the NC Rural Center-spawned Business Resource Alliance. We have the process consultants from the Industrial Extension Service, some of our business or management schools, as well as the private sector. SBCN. We have the Institute for Minority Economic Development. We have regional entrepreneurial support organizations, like the Council for Entrepreneurial Development (CED) and some of the NC Rural Center’s pilot projects, the entrepreneurial outreach efforts of the UNC system’s 11 entrepreneurship centers and other centers at private colleges like Elon University. And depending on what part of the state you are in, the local office of the Cooperative Extension Service may well be able to provide some consulting for your small business.

What we have lacked with all these agencies and organizations is coordination. And lack of coordination means inefficiency – rather than becoming great at core competencies, organizations are tempted to claim they can “do it all.” The Small Business Commissioner approach gives the state, for the first time, some folks with responsibility and permission to herd cats, to figure out what is and isn’t getting done, and to determine how to make it happen.

If Daugherty and Millsaps get it right, it’ll mean that small innovative businesses won’t waste as much time having to figure out where to go when they run into challenges. That saves time and improves service and helps businesses implement innovation quicker.

Why should non-wonks care about small-sized businesses? Because they’re not small in impact: There’s a decent chance that’s where your next job is coming from. Businesses with fewer than 100 employees make up 96% of all businesses in the state; and account for 45% of our net job growth.

As it happens some spots in North Carolina do a pretty darned good job of working with one particularly important kind of small business as well: the kind known as “gazelles.” Gazelle firms are enterprises who have at least doubled sales and employment over the past four years. According to the SBA, among all major metropolitan areas in the nation, the Triangle and Charlotte areas rank 2^nd and 5^th nationally in the percentage of their firms that are these “high growth” gazelles.

Mangled metaphor of the day: If a new Small Business Commissioner can figure out how North Carolina can help more gazelles run faster, everyone will hear the sound of that tree falling in the forest.

If you had a recommendation for policy change to the Small Business Commissioner, what would it be? What could a small business commissioner do to boost innovation in North Carolina?

Tags: BLNC, Business Resource Alliance, CED, Cooperative Extension Service, Elon, gazelles, Institute for Minority Economic Development, NC Rural Center, SBCN, SBTDC, Scott Daugherty