Mapping South Carolina's Intellectual Capital

From the seaboard to the mountains, South Carolina has experienced a makeover in the last 20 years second to few other states. The changes are reshaping the SC economy: vacationers and retirees filling new and old coastal communities are boosting tourism and real estate development; an explosion in world trade combined with a logistics revolution is transforming Charleston into an international supply chain hub and seeding new distribution facilities along the state's major transportation corridors; and a flow of foreign investment is bringing high-tech manufacturing facilities to replace textile plants and agriculture in the Midlands and Upstate. There is good reason to examine South Carolina's prospects for growth over the long term. It needs to identify the talent emerging because of the state's transformation. As the state begins to absorb its share of the retiring baby boom generation, the opportunity to survey its intellectual capital is obvious.