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Minnesota is a corporate powerhouse, thanks in part to a culture of leadership in the workforce, a University of Minnesota researcher said Wednesday.

Myles Shaver, a professor at university's Carlson School of Management, said Minnesota has 17 Fortune 500 corporate headquarters. According to his research, that's an unusual number for state, given its population and region.

"A couple years ago, there were a couple more, there were 19, and that's when I ran data that compared a lot of different cities around the country," Shaver told MPR News' Morning Edition. "And if you looked at us per capita, we had the most Fortune 500s compared to anyone. And I think that even understates it, because we have so many privately held firms in town also."

Those include giants like Carlson and Cargill. Shaver said some companies that aren't headquartered in Minnesota, among Boston Scientific and Thomson Reuters, have very large operations and workforces in the state.

In the last 60 years, the number of Fortune 500 corporate headquarters in the Twin Cities has increased from just nine, unlike many other comparable industrialized cities in the northern United States.

Shaver said he hopes to study why Minnesota, and the Twin Cities in particular, have proven so good at fostering corporate giants.

But the state's big businesses, Shaver said, often don't have an obvious link to the region. He cited Target, the retail giant, and medical technology giant Medtronic, which do not have a necessary connection to natural resources or other features of the state.

"A lot of the theories we have for why we have concentrations of business in the area just don't hold here," he said. "This is not a place like Silicon Valley where all the firms are tech firms. If you look around, the big businesses in town are very diverse. They're in a lot of different industries," Shaver said.

One thing the businesses share is a workforce.

"When I take a look at the data, this has been a headquarters town for probably 100 years, and one of the real key things about headquarters aren't the big buildings," Shaver said. "It's the people the people who work inside them. And I think one of the interesting things about this place is that we have a big concentration of talent that runs big businesses. We've had it for a long time. And it tends to stay in the region and often moves from company to company... This place is an anomaly in some ways."

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Myles Shaver, a professor at the University of Minnesota's Carlson School of Management, said the state's concentration of business talent is key to its number of Fortune 500 companies.

Researcher: Minnesota's corporate presence stems from leadership

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