Indiana Governor Eric Holcomb Reflects on His Term, Where Indiana is Going
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STATEWIDE–Indiana’s Governor Eric Holcomb says he’s reflecting on his time as Governor now that it’s about to come to an end next month. Mike Braun will be inaugurated as Indiana’s next Governor in January.
Holcomb tells Inside Indiana Business investments in the state from entities like Meta, Google, and Microsoft are only going to make the state stronger for decades to come.
“Those long-term investments, those strategic investments, really have made a difference in terms of not just the growth, but the new opportunity that will be here [and] not somewhere else. I think Indiana has really hit our groove in terms of alignment of mission and purpose.”
Holcomb says having higher education institutions involved with company conversations is giving Indiana an advantage.
In 2024, he says Indiana broke its record for committed capital investments in the first three quarters of the year. The previous record was set in all of 2023.
As construction continues on data centers and other emerging businesses, Holcomb says workforce is “absolutely unfinished business”. He says getting the top talent to not only improve, but stay in Indiana will be a necessary challenge to overcome.
At the LEAP Innovation and Research District in Lebanon, Eli Lilly said it will invest more than $13 billion. Last month Meta, the parent company of Facebook, struck a tentative deal with Lebanon that could eventually mean an investment of up to $4.8 billion at LEAP.
“People, wherever I go around the world or the country or the state, know the Lilly name and what it means to their well-being…I can be sitting in King Faisal Hospital in Riyadh (Saudi Arabia) and one of the first things out of the hospital administrator’s mouth is ‘we do business with Eli Lilly,’ just to let me know. We’re bigger than, you know, the Indy 500 and Larry Bird. Now, Eli Lilly is just as big in the corporate sector, and so for them to be able to grow, it means the world to our reputation and stature in terms of how we grow alongside corporate intentions,” continued Holcomb in his interview with Gerry Dick of Inside Indiana Business.
