The Economic Development Corporation is promoting a new tax credit, officially announced June 30, for investors in "innovation"-based industries like biotechnology and IT. 

“We’re trying to attract and keep serial entrepreneurs in the state,” Saul Kaplan, the executive director of the EDC, said in an interview yesterday. “We need more of them in Rhode Island.”

Rhode Island has seen steady employment growth, adding 800 jobs last month and reducing unemployment to 4.7 percent. But salaries remain below the national average, and the state consistently trails Massachusetts, which has established one of the country’s largest concentrations of biotechnology firms.

Various tax credits have come under fire recently by antipoverty advocates fighting cuts to social services. But the governor has resisted attempts to gut the programs, arguing that job creation is needed to boost the state’s tax revenue.