The Florida High Tech Corridor is an economic development initiative of three of the country’s largest research institutions: University of Central Florida (UCF), University of South Florida (USF) and University of Florida (UF). Our mission over the past 25 years has been to grow high-tech industry and innovation – and the workforce to support it – in a 23-county region spanning Florida from Tampa, through Orlando and Gainesville, and out to the Space Coast. We facilitate collaborations between partners in academia, industry and economic development to create communities with unlimited potential across the central Florida Region.  As the new CEO since June 2020, my vision is to build on our rich high-tech innovation heritage of the last quarter-century and to aggressively expand these boundary-breaking collaborative partnerships beyond Florida, at both the national and international level.  We’ve already started this acceleration journey.  Just one example:  by connecting The Corridor with the US EDA, the SBA, the Department of Defense and the Department of Energy for cooperative grants and research partnerships to benefit Florida’s high-tech ecosystem of companies and the communities they serve, we’re beginning to bring additional critical resources and true visibility into our region from outside Florida (e.g.  The Corridor was a winner in the inaugural SBA SBIR Catalyst prize in July 2021  https://www.sbir.gov/accelerators )  I believe a partnership between The Corridor and the ACE organizations would lead to incredible synergistic outcomes for our region as we expand outward, learning from similar organizations across the Americas and serving them with our unique resources as well.  Another specific example of a project currently spearheaded by The Corridor is our Central Florida Cluster Initiative with Orange County called “Cenfluence”, https://cenfluence.com/, where we’re building on four specific industry clusters in the region: 1) Energy & Environmental Sciences; 2) Gaming, Entertainment & eSports; 3) Learning Sciences & Human Performance; and 4) Life Sciences.  This multi-year project, started just this year, will help us collaborate and connect in the global arena.  I believe by attending ACE Louisiana, I can continue to listen and learn how other organizations build and expand “innovation corridors” and also share with other participants what we’re doing here in Florida.  In my mind, it’s a huge win/win.

The Corridor was part of the Florida region that participated in ACE 8 in 2017, so we have some experience with the ACE framework, although to my knowledge no one kept up the connections with the ACE network since then.  As I look at the application guide for ACE Louisiana, I’m especially intrigued by the four focus areas: 1) Life Sciences; 2) Water Management; 3) Agribusiness; 4) Transportation and how those four intersect with what Florida is focusing on moving forward.  For example, as I mentioned in the previous block, one of the industry clusters we’re curating across The Corridor is Life Sciences.  I’d love to be able to compare notes with Louisiana to see how we can learn from them and collaborate in Life Sciences.  Additionally, if you look at Florida, with its multiple deep-water ports, its road and rail systems, its airports (including innovation in regional air mobility with companies like Lilium https://lilium.com/ from Germany moving to Florida) and now its growing Space Ports, the ACE Louisiana focus on transportation fits exceedingly well for connection and collaboration.  On the Agribusiness side, UF and its network of Education Resource Centers for agriculture would be a great topic to dive into at ACE Louisiana.  UF is also focused on some of the world-leading, boundary-breaking collaboration between Artificial Intelligence, robotics, and farming https://ai.ufl.edu/.  And finally, I think it would be amazing in the future to get the ACE network to revisit Florida, particularly in areas outside of ACE 8 (the east-central corridor of Orlando, Space Coast, Gainesville) by focusing on the Orlando-Tampa west-central Corridor with a hook down to Miami.