Page 32 - Innovation Delaware 2021

WHY DELAWARE?
| BY LARRY NAGENGAST
IT’S EASY TO CONNECT HERE
In Delaware, policymakers, high-profile entrepreneurs and top-notch researchers are just a phone call away
As a place for doing business, Delaware’s “enormous benefit” is that it is ... small.
So says BOB PERKINS, executive director of the Delaware Business Roundtable, a collaboration of the state’s most influential leaders in the
private sector.
Small can sometimes be a problem,
Perkins admits, like when it comes to matching the economic incentives other states can offer to attract new businesses. But small also means personal, and that’s evident in Delawareans’ ability to chat up
their U.S. senators in the checkout line at the supermarket. “That sort of thing doesn’t happen in bigger states,” Perkins says.
The easy, collaborative atmosphere in the First State is often referred to as the “Delaware Way.” For those doing business here, it means the process is “speedy and collaborative,” says MICHAEL QUARANTA, president of the Delaware State Chamber of Commerce. “The goal is to gather decision makers together and find ways to resolve questions that businesses that want to land here might have.”
MICHAEL QUARANTA
One major new effort to harness Delaware’s spirit of collaboration is the Science & Tech Advisors, a group convened by the state’s economic development agency, the Delaware Prosperity Partnership (DPP).
The group’s 32 members represent all the big growth sectors of Dela- ware’s innovation economy — including bioscience, health care, chemistry, agribusiness and more — as well as the major research universities. After their first meeting early last year, the advisors broke into three groups to study the needs of startups, mid-tier and large corporations in Delaware. Their goal: to find where the gaps are and create a roadmap for what can be initiated. State government is going to look to the group’s findings for what Delaware can do to make itself even more attractive to companies at every stage of growth. (For more on how state government, including the Delaware Prosperity Partnership and the Division of Small Business, can help companies grow, see page 32.)
30 DelawareBusinessTimes.com
JEFF FETTERMAN
JUSTIN HEYES/MOONLOOP PHOTOGRAPHY
JUSTIN HEYES/MOONLOOP PHOTOGRAPHY