Don Herriott Prior to joining USC, Don Herriott spent 28 years in the pharmaceutical industry. In 2004 he was named Head of Roche Global Chemical Manufacturing, responsible for the operations at its pharmaceutical manufacturing sites in South Carolina, Colorado, Mexico, Austria, Germany, Ireland, and Switzerland. He retired November 2009. Don Herriott became director of Innovista Partnerships in February 2010.

Herriott sees his job at Innovista as an overlap with area–wide knowledge–based economic development, the issues he engaged while chair of the South Carolina Chamber of Commerce. But his economic orientation began further back than his chamber stint. Growing up in the Bay Area dominated by San Francisco, Herriott as a kid could see firsthand the early evolution of the Computer Age.

Herriott was born in Hamilton, Montana, where his father ran a grocery store. The store had to shut down, so Herriott was taken as a two–year old with his family to Oakland, Calif. Growing up in Marin County, Herriott excelled in both football and basketball. He had images of himself as either an astronaut or a professional basketball player.

Herriott’s father became an air traffic controller in the Bay Area, and he retired as an air traffic controller, later getting hired by the United Nations as an air traffic consultant.

For high school walkaround money, Herriott took just about every paying part–time job offered. Vivid memories include cleaning out dog kennels.

Other memories include meeting his wife Barbara during French class his junior year. Understanding a good thing, Herriott stayed with French for his senior year. The two ran together on again and off again during their college years at different schools, and by graduation they were on again. About that time Herriott’s parents, then based in New York State, were visiting the Bay Area. A side trip to a Reno, Nev. wedding chapel as an audience before Rev. Love made esteemed sense, not calling for a second trip out for Herriott’s parents.

The Herriotts have two children. Daughter Dana is the older of the two. She works as a team leader for BlueCross BlueShield of S.C. Matt, four years younger than Dana, runs the student wellness center at Charleston’s MUSC.

Entering Sonoma State University in Rohnert Park, Calif., Herriott began college as a chemistry major. Two physics professors inspired Herriott to shift out of chemistry into physics. One professor wrote the text on quantum mechanics while he showed in local art galleries as an accomplished painter. The other inspiring professor was chair of the physics department at Harvard, but he tired of the administrative duties and left Harvard for Sonoma State to return to teaching.

While in college for five years — the extra year was Herriott’s price he paid to change majors — Herriott generated income from building fences, managing the chemistry stock room, and teaching physics to the freshmen. He continued his basketball, just not on the varsity, and he gained a brown belt in judo. With his focus on academics, Herriott was identified as a Small School Scholar and was invited to work summers in the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where he heard plenty of positive feedback.

Earning his B.S. in physics “with honors and distinction,” Herriott took his first job after college in computers at San Francisco– based Liberty National Bank. Liberty National had its headquarters on Montgomery Street with Wells Fargo and Bank of America, but its back–office data processing was in what the cab drivers and the convention planners called the Tenderloin District.

Herriott’s boss at Liberty National was pushing him out of computers and into management, so for a full year Herriott got the full exposure to the vertically integrated bank, taking on some jobs for two days and other jobs for two weeks. When his management training year was up, Herriott still preferred the technological side of the banking business over the managerial.

He worked with IBM development teams for the next three years, which explains why Herriott never bothered with graduate school. The pay and the advancement in those years in Herriott’s technical fields were in experience. Practical application was worth more than academic background.

After the three years with the development teams, Herriott was put back on the management track, where he survived four mergers. The last one put Liberty National in place as the mergee, erasing the name and inserting Herriott’s Liberty National into Union Bank.

Herriott left the bank for the IT section of SYNTEX, a drug manufacturer. Herriott’s office was next to Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif., where there was a mutual appreciation of the IT side of any business. Herriott worked in technical support of main frame computers, global communications, data networks, and telephone networks. He oversaw 8,000 telephone lines in a campus setting.

His boss, the CIO for SYNTEX, was grooming Herriott to become the next CIO, so Herriott was sent to Boulder, Colo., where he headed engineering and maintenance for one of the company’s manufacturing plants. After just three months in management over engineering and maintenance, Herriott asked to be returned to manufacturing.

After considerable time in corporate logistics at the SYNTEX compound in Palo Alto, Herriott was sent to Springfield, Mo. by Roche, the drug manufacturer that took over SYNTEX in 1994. Herriott was later called back to Boulder by Roche as the company’s international product manager.

Even though the decision to build a drug manufacturing plant in Florence, S.C., was said and done, and even though Roche already had $300 million on the Florence ground in construction, Roche was considering canceling the Florence site altogether and walking away from its $300 million, knowing another $300 million was necessary to finish the plant. There was too much capacity in the world in the drug industry, and Roche also had too much capacity.

It was Herriott’s recommendation to close other plants and shift production to Florence, consolidating operations in a state–of– the–art $600 million plant.

Once Herriott had the Roche Florence plant up and running, he shifted his attention to community activities as a leading corporate citizen.

He started a local education foundation in Florence, which now has $2 million in the bank. He led Gov. Jim Hodges’s task force on workforce development. Pathways to Prosperity was redirected to legislative education reform in the 2005 Education and Economic Development Act. In 2004, the S.C. Chamber of Commerce honored Herriott with its S.C. Business Leader of the Year Award. Also in 2004, Coker College awarded Herriott his Honorary Doctorate of Human Letters.