North Carolina Virtual Economic Engine is a volunteer initiative to connect virtually entrepreneurship in the Triangle region to the rural counties of North Carolina. We are first focusing on the Agriculture and Manufacturing sectors to help create new value added and “sellable” products and services that would reduce NC’s heavy dependence on the sale of produced commodities. Additionally, the NCVEE program aims to develop startups that address problems in the local communities by creating life-improving and commercially viable products and services. Long-term, this program also aims to reach internationally and create access to both opportunity and markets from North Carolina and to North Carolina.

Traditionally, an economic engine for a state is based in a specific location and has an economic gravity that attracts people, ideas, funding, production, and activity in terms of dollars (e.g. Duke University, Fort Bragg, Dupont Chemical production, Metropolitan Life Insurance, etc.).  This traditional view of an economic engine should now be viewed from a perspective that for the first time in economic history, there is enough broadband communication capacity, computing processing speed, access to memory and storage that in great measure allow an economic engine to be virtual with data being an underlying “real” asset in addition to traditional asset classes.  There is now an opportunity to form an economic engine by creating a distributed network from what is currently a fragmented effort of entrepreneurship at various locations with varying levels of timely effectiveness. The advantage of such a distributed network would be that benefits of value creation would remain at the network node that initiated and progresses the value (i.e. local job and business creation that will remain local and will not be extracted to a central location)

The business case for the NCVEE program is a combination of technological advance and market demand for solutions for the following problems: 

• Current offerings in the entrepreneurship space (innovation centers, co-working spaces, venture centers, etc.) individually serve a narrow interest for venture capital, are primarily an incremental innovation in commercial real estate, or do not necessarily create opportunities in “cross pollination” of innovation and entrepreneurship.

• Current offerings do not serve the incipient entrepreneur by offering continuity of opportunity and presence within an entrepreneurship ecosystem, but focus on graduating the entrepreneur out as a measure of success.

• In North Carolina, current offerings in the entrepreneurship space do not have a strong enough connection in promoting innovation to create new sellable products and services in the $80 billion Agriculture sector from mainly commodity production to value added product manufacturing

• An individual or a team of individuals who have a business idea typically have a difficult challenge in knowing how (and where) to start on a path to create a sellable product or service, and what is the road map for long-term business development and innovation. Additionally, there is no single entrepreneurship ecosystem that allows a startup business to systematically “de-risk” its acquisition of capability (people, funding, operations, organizational development, R&D, product development, etc.).

• Current students are entering a job market where workers’ share of total economic output is continuing its downward decline, implying that entry-level apprenticeships may not be the best initial stepping-stone for long-term wealth creation.

      ( https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2017/article/estimating-the-us-labor-share.htm)

The combination of market demand for solutions, the availability of technology that can be applied, and the readiness and commitment of Subject Matter Experts (“SMEs”) create a narrow window of both “Leapfrog” economic development and startup opportunity that has the prospect of significantly mitigating the aforementioned problems.  The target beneficiaries of this program are prospective entrepreneurs who (1) have a business idea, (2) have the ability to cooperate and achieve business success in a team environment, and (3) can gain long-term from the entrepreneurship aims and activities of the NCVEE projects. Program gains are defined as the creation of startup businesses, mutual wealth in terms of individual equity ownership, revenue and profit sharing, and increase in the community tax base.