Studer Community Institute

Innovation centers on the rise

June 17, 2015
/ David Tortorano, Gulf Coast Reporters League
/ economy

Roger Wehner enjoys talking about the project taking shape a block away in a 1940s-era building. He speaks with passion about the importance of research and innovation to the future of the aerospace industry in the Gulf Coast. Small wonder. A veteran economic development professional, Wehner is executive director of the Mobile Airport Authority. What has him excited is an 80,000 square-foot research center that will open in 2016 at the Mobile Aeroplex, a significant ripple from the Airbus decision to build A320s in Mobile. The Alabama Aviation Innovation and Research Center, called A²IRc and pronounced “air.” When up and running, it will be where the best and brightest from a variety of disciplines in academia and industry collaborate on research with implications for the aerospace industry. It will become part of the nation’s $465 billion R&D enterprise. The phase one renovation of Building 14 involves a complete makeover of the three joined buildings. It will create space for six university participants, along with related offices, lab space, collaboration rooms and likely an incubator. Behind the 80,000 square foot project is another 260,000 square feet of connected building space, much of it former warehouse space. An aerospace supplier has already committed to 40,000 square feet at the north end, and the space right next door is expected to go to another aviation company. The space between those operations and the education facilities will become a part of the $25 million A²IRc. Wehner said lessons were taken from two areas that were successful in creating industrial clusters. One is the Commonwealth Center for Advanced Manufacturing in Richmond, Va., and the other is the International Center for Automotive Research in Greenville, S.C. “What we found that was positively correlated with success was a holistic workforce development model and bringing the research and innovation capacity to bear at the site of the project, at the heart of the cluster,” he said. “The number one thing the companies like the most about it is the ability to access intellectual capital.” Bishop State Community College, the University of Alabama, Auburn University, the University of South Alabama, Tuskegee University and Troy University all will have a presence at the center. A²IRc is just the latest of the research and applied technology operations in the Gulf Coast I-10 region. One of the best-known is the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition (IHMC) in Pensacola, Fla., experts in human-machine cognition, artificial intelligence and robotics. In the June 5-6 DARPA robotic challenge, where the best minds in robotics created robots to perform life-saving tasks, IHMC came in second to a team from Korea. Best in the U.S., it beat the likes of MIT, Carnegie Mellon and NASA. It took home a $1 million prize. The research labs in the Gulf Coast region have hundreds of scientists and technicians doing multimillion-dollar cutting-edge research in a variety of fields, including aerial weapons development at Eglin Air Force Base, Fla., and space-related research at Stennis Space Center, Miss. They attract the best and the brightest that help an area compete for 21st century jobs. Condensed from Chapter 4, Gulf Coast Aerospace Corridor 2015-2016. Read all of chapter four here. Gulf_Coast_Aerospace_Corridor.com is a website created in 2008 to highlight aerospace activities along the Interstate 10 corridor between New Orleans and Northwest Florida. It includes reference material, job postings, a daily aerospace newsfeed and weekly column. In 2011, the website teamed with several journalists to create the Gulf Coast Reporters’ League, which writes and publishes an annual book about aerospace in the region. The first book was published in June 2011. In September 2013, the League launched an eight-page quarterly aerospace newsletter, which became a bimonthly in August 2014 after the League published the fourth edition of the annual. All the books can be found at: www.gulfcoastaerospacecorridor.com/gcacbooksall.h

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Innovation centers on the rise

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