Laboratory research is a billion-dollar industry in Florida, but it represents only a share of the innovation taking place here. |
If innovation has a single brick-and-mortar symbol in Florida, then the newly opened campus of Scripps Florida in Jupiter would be it. Almost from the moment in October 2003 that the La Jolla, Calif.-based research institute announced its intention to establish a facility in Florida, the move to build an innovation economy for the 21st century took off.
First came Scripps in Jupiter. Then its California neighbor, Torrey Pines Institute for Molecular Studies, announced that it would build its East Coast headquarters at Port St. Lucie. Pretty soon, a “medical city,” anchored by Burnham Institute for Medical Research and the new University of Central Florida College of Medicine, began to take shape at Lake Nona in southeast Orlando.
Meanwhile, on Florida’s west coast, where the H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center & Research Institute in Tampa had already established a reputation for ground-breaking discoveries, SRI International, another California company, was making plans to open a marine technology research facility alongside the University of South Florida in St. Petersburg. And by 2006, the makings of a high-tech corridor that today spans the midsection of Florida from the Gulf of Mexico to the Atlantic Ocean and incorporates four distinct bioscience clusters was well under way.
| » Florida at a Glance
Area: 67 counties; 58,664 square miles
Population: 18.33 million
Civilian labor force: 9.23 million (2008)
Gross domestic product: $734.5 billion
Total exports: $73 billion
Florida-origin exports: $54.3 billion
Total R&D expenditures: $6.2 billion
Venture capital invested: $239.5 million
Source: Florida Knowledge Center at www.eflorida.com |
Subsequently, Max Planck Institute of Bio-imaging would join Scripps in Jupiter, and the Vaccine and Gene Therapy Institute, a branch of the Oregon Health & Science University, would move into the neighborhood in Port St. Lucie where Torrey Pines had settled.
Orlando’s “medical city” would add new tenants, too: M.D. Anderson Orlando Cancer Center, a U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center and Nemours, which broke ground on its Children’s Hospital and Pediatric Health Campus at Lake Nona in February 2009.
We’ve only just begun
Scripps Florida began a movement that simply snowballed. Today, Florida is dotted with new arrivals — proof that innovators really do like to be where other innovators already are.
If you’d like to meet some of the great minds working in Florida, check out Enterprise Florida’s Academic Hall of Fame at www.eflorida.com. It’s chock full of brilliance — Nobel laureates, members of the National Academy of Sciences and IEEE Fellows, to name but a few distinctive titles.
What is innovation, anyway?
Innovation is one of those terms that almost defies definition, and bioscience is only the tip of the iceberg. People are quick to recognize innovation when they see it coming from a laboratory in the form of a new vaccine or a potential cure for some debilitating disease. And they cozy up to it when they go shopping for a big-screen TV, a hybrid car or the latest interactive cell phone.
But innovation is much more than scientific discovery and high-tech gadgetry. It can also come in the form of paperless medical records, smart controls for delivering energy more efficiently and a cooler-sized device that makes water from air — all of which are innovations originating in Florida.
Here, the word innovation has implications that go well beyond the laboratory; it encompasses all fields and touches every business interest. In Florida, innovation is defined as “an attitude that makes anything possible.”
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