By Debra Chandler Landis, St. Louis Magazine | February 23, 2021
St. Louis might be universally recognized for baseball, beer, and the Arch, but it’s also internationally known as a leader in a number of industries, among them health care, financial services, agriculture, technology, data science, and geospatial intelligence.
Fourteen Fortune 1000 companies are headquartered here, with eight in the Fortune 500, among them Edward Jones, Centene, Emerson Electric, and Reinsurance Group of America. They play vital roles in the community through charitable donations, sponsorships, board leadership, outreach to local colleges and schools, and key partnerships.
A number of St. Louis–based companies that consistently rank among Fortune’s 100 Best Companies to Work For are also known for their tireless dedication to the community.
Edward Jones, which ranked No. 7 in 2020, has raised more than $25 million in the fight against Alzheimer’s. The financial services firm is also working to build equity, bolstering financial literacy through its Financial Fitness program and investing $1.2 million in the National Urban League and its St. Louis affiliate last year to provide economic empowerment and educational opportunities.
In addition to its place on Fortune’s list of top employers, World Wide Technology has received recognition as a best workplace for diversity, women, millennials, and parents. The company shows that same type of commitment in the community, providing STEM education to foster a diverse workforce through mentorships, internships, and other opportunities. Last year, World Wide Technology Raceway was recognized for its efforts toward diversity and inclusion during the NASCAR Drive for Diversity awards.
World Wide Technology CEO and co-founder Jim Kavanaugh also played a key role in bringing Major League Soccer to St. Louis, alongside Carolyn Kindle Betz, president of the Enterprise Holdings Foundation, the philanthropic arm for Enterprise Holdings. In FY2020, the foundation donated $57.5 million toward community causes, and it’s long been a supporter of the United Way.
As with the forthcoming soccer stadium, Enterprise executive chairman Andy Taylor served a vital part in the renovation of the Gateway Arch National Park and Soldiers Memorial Military Museum downtown. While accepting the prestigious St. Louis Award in December 2018, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported, Taylor said, “This place is worth the investment. I think we’re on the edge of a renaissance here.”
Like Taylor, BioSTL president and CEO Donn Rubin recognizes a sense of momentum across the region. He believes the metro area now has the infrastructure to attract and retain growing numbers of entrepreneurs—a real change for the startup scene from the past two decades.
“Brilliant, creative people were graduating and taking their ideas to California or Boston,” he says. “Now there is a glue, a connective tissue, bringing together people, innovation districts, powerhouse universities, capital and investments.”
Such a sea change was in large part driven by some of the area’s leading institutions—BJC HealthCare, Washington University, Saint Louis University, the University of Missouri–St. Louis, and the Missouri Botanical Garden—forming the Cortex Innovation Community in 2002. Over time, the district has expanded both its footprint and scope, evolving from a focus on bioscience to a range of startups.
In 2018, the same year that Square expanded its workforce here, Microsoft opened a technology center in Cortex. (Square has now outgrown that space and is moving to the former Post-Dispatch Building, downtown.)
The next year, Washington University and Saint Louis University launched COLLAB, a 7,700-square-foot facility in the innovation district that aims to bolster university-industry partnerships and offer entrepreneurial opportunities to students.
Not far from Cortex, at the intersection of Grand and Chouteau, SSM Health and the SLU School of Medicine are building on a years-long partnership by opening the $550 million SSM Health Saint Louis University Hospital. The state-of-the-art facility will help meet the needs of an estimated 50,000 patients within a 250-mile radius annually.
On the agricultural front, Danforth Plant Science Center senior research scientist Nadia Shakoor recently received a $1.4 million grant to develop FieldDock, an integrated smart farm system that can collect and analyze real-time data from the field, allowing farmers to produce high-yield energy-efficient crops. Danforth Center associate member Dilip Shah, who’s helped develop solutions to fight fungal diseases in plants, is collaborating with ag-tech startup Plastomics to develop disease-resistant soybeans.
Already a key partner at the Danforth Center and 39 North, Bayer recently partnered with the T-REX innovation incubator downtown to build Geosaurus, a 15,000-square-foot space dedicated to geospatial intelligence startups. With the completion of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency’s new $1.7 billion campus in north St. Louis, the region is positioned to become a leader in the field.
“NGA’s new campus will be built with spaces that will facilitate information-sharing and collaboration among NGA’s and St. Louis’ talented innovators,” says NGA director Vice Admiral Robert Sharp. “NGA has been proud to call St. Louis home for the past 70 years. I’m excited to see what NGA’s people and partners in the St. Louis region can accomplish together for the next 70.”
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