SC Innovation Hub

SCIH Cover Page
SCIH Account Dashboard
SCIH Events and Map Page
Meet the Team

Inspiration:

Inspired by Town of Mount Pleasant and SC Competes, we wanted to help bring entrepreneurs and people together across tech, life sciences, and creative sectors together.

What it does:

We built SC Innovation Hub as a digital platform that unites South Carolina’s tech, AI, cyber, and innovation communities in one centralized, searchable, and scalable hub. The goal is to connect people to opportunities, highlight companies doing incredible work in the community.

How we built it:

We built SC Innovation Hub using a modern full-stack framework with a focus on performance, scalability, and data automation. The frontend was developed with React and Next.js for fast, responsive user experiences. We used PostgreSQL as our database, with Prisma ORM to efficiently manage and query data. For data aggregation, we integrated Firecrawl AI, which automates scraping and structures content from trusted sources like BuiltIn, GoodFirms, and Meetup. Our backend is also built in Next.js, enabling seamless API routing, authentication, and server-side functionality.

Challenges we ran into:

One of our biggest challenges was the time-intensive process of web scraping and data aggregation. While Firecrawl AI helped streamline structured data collection, ensuring data quality, validation, and source tracking took longer than expected, especially across multiple platforms.

We also had to prioritize core functionality over some planned features. For example, we weren’t able to fully implement the News section, and our vision for user profiles with features like following companies or connecting via LinkedIn had to be scoped down for the hackathon timeline.

These features are next on our roadmap, and the backend groundwork is already in place, we just ran out of time to bring them to life.

Accomplishments that we're proud of:

We’re proud to have built a fully functional, scalable platform that goes beyond just a prototype, it’s something we can actually launch and grow. Key accomplishments include a dynamic business directory, a map feature that visually highlights innovation activity, and a ready-to-integrate events system with real-time scraping and categorization.

We also implemented full user account creation and authentication, allowing us to build toward more personalized features like bookmarks and connections. For a short hackathon window, we’re proud not just of what we built, but of the solid foundation we’ve laid for future development.