The following is an excerpt from The Beat, Minne Inno’s daily newsletter covering tech, startups and innovation in Minnesota. Sign up for The Beat to have the top headlines delivered to your inbox each weekday afternoon.
Less than a week after one of Minnesota’s largest public companies, Mosaic Co., announced that it was leaving the state, two Minnesota business joined the new Fortune 500 list.
Medina-based powersports company Polaris Industries climbed onto the list at 462, and St. Paul-based Securian Financial Group cracked the rankings at 496. With the addition of these two businesses (and after Mosaic’s departure) Minnesota is now home to 18 Fortune 500 companies – the same as last year.
Minnesota has lost four companies from the Fortune 500 list to mergers and acquisitions since 2000. Most recently, St. Jude Medical (ranked 434 on last year’s list) was acquired by Abbott Laboratories in 2016. Despite these comings and goings, the number of Fortune 500 companies in Minnesota has remained steady over the last decade.
Here are a few notable rankings from this year’s list: UnitedHealth Group, the state’s largest public business, came in at fifth overall. Coming in at 39, Target is Minnesota’s second-largest public company. After that comes Best Buy, which held onto its slot at 72, the same as last year.
Why should startups and other small companies care about Minnesota’s biggest businesses? Fortune 500s strengthen the local business infrastructure by creating a pipeline of talent, resources and investments to build up local startup ecosystems. They also can be customers to smaller businesses. As the startup scene in Minnesota continues to evolve, more Fortune 500 companies like Target and Ecolab are engaging directly with the ecosystem through partnerships with organizations like Techstars to mentor and fund local entrepreneurs.
But you don’t need to be a Minnesota-based Fortune 500 company to have an impact on the state’s startups. Agriculture giant Cargill, one of Minnesota’s large private companies, is also working with Techstars on the new Farm to Fork accelerator. And Boston Scientific, which is based in Massachusetts but has a sizable presence in Minnesota, funded gener8tor‘s new gBETA Medtech program, an accelerator for early-stage medical startups.
The bottom line: Fortune 500 companies and other large businesses are good for the local economy. But they’re even better when they build up the smaller businesses that also call Minnesota home.
View the full list of Fortune 500 Minnesota companies here.
