South Carolina has what it takes to build a competitive economy over the next 20 years, a national expert says.

His big question: Does it have the will?

“My concern is about whether South Carolina will move in a different direction, whether you can actually get anything done,” competitiveness guru Michael Porter told S.C. business and government leaders Monday.

Porter outlined a sweeping platform to move South Carolina from an economy based on the low cost of doing business to one based on providing high value to business.

That is the only way to improve the state’s per capita income, which ranks at 80 percent of the national average. South Carolina needs to be a high-wage state rather than a low-wage state, he said.

Both government officials and business leaders heard Porter’s proposals enthusiastically.

A who’s who of both camps turned out to hear the Harvard professor deliver his report as part of USC’s Annual Economic Outlook Conference. More than 400 people registered for the event.

The study of South Carolina’s economy was commissioned by the S.C. Department of Commerce, S.C. Department of Parks, Recreation and Tourism, the Palmetto Institute, the Economic Development Foundation of South Carolina, the Palmetto Business Forum and the S.C. Chamber of Commerce.

The study was conducted by the Monitor Group, a Massachusetts-based strategy and competitiveness firm that Porter helped co-found. Porter, a leading expert on competitiveness, donated his services to the project, which has been dubbed the South Carolina Competitiveness Initiative.

The private-public collaboration on the study should move it from recommendations to action.

S.C. Secretary of Commerce Bob Faith said the next step will be for the study’s partners to work on a structure for implementing Porter’s recommendations.

The involvement of business is absolutely critical to the process to move beyond the short-term political visions of two and four years. Changing South Carolina’s economy will take at least a decade.

Porter has suggested creating an S.C. Council on Competitiveness co-chaired by the governor and a business leader.

That council’s chief task would be to work on eight campaigns that Porter sees as essential to transforming South Carolina.

“There are a number of recommendations in this report that clearly reinforce the direction this administration is taking on the economic development front,” Gov. Mark Sanford said after the conference.

Unless South Carolina changes its economic development strategy, Porter said, the state’s standard of living will slide, and South Carolina will lag even further behind the rest of United States.

The state’s traditional strategy of business recruitment has served it pretty well, Porter said. “But it is over. It has run its course. Events have overtaken it. “

The strategy of being a low-cost place to do business worked well and produced a broad economy. But in a global economy, South Carolina can no longer compete on that basis.

However, that strategy created some strengths: a diversified mix of industries, a pretty good labor force and some good technical schools.

South Carolina has something to build on. “We are not in any kind of a hopeless situation. There are some assets out there we can build on,” Porter said.

Now South Carolina must change directions. The state needs to move from creating jobs, any jobs, to creating prosperity.

“You’ve got to raise the quality of the jobs. You’ve got to move from being the low-cost place to do business to being the high-value place to do business, where you can be more productive. You’ve got to move from recruiting individual companies to creating clusters,” Porter said.

South Carolina also must move from a state where government is in the driver’s seat on economic development “to a collaborative process in which it is those of you in this room that are going to make this work,” Porter said.

Porter and his team are committed to continuing to work with the groups in the state — but only if the state is serious.

“Competitiveness is a marathon, not a sprint,” he said. “Regions that improve their prosperity do it by making consistent progress over a long period of time, not by making a quick burst of activity.

“The big challenge facing this state is: ‘Can we run a marathon?’”