Clusters of industry work, economic experts say, because they feed off each other and build a critical mass of skilled workers and suppliers that support each other, easily attracting similar operations. Pensacola city and Chamber officials say they are actively pursuing a number of clusters, including aerospace and technology industries. ST Aerospace is a prime example, said Scott Luth, vice president for economic development at the Greater Pensacola Chamber of Commerce. That success story is partly the result of a decision that airport authorities made to not build a parallel runway, but open up more land for commercial development. Another example is an unnamed aerospace supply corporation that will be the first company to build in the Pensacola Technology Campus downtown, vacant for more than three years. The supplier’s 70,000-square-foot facility will be funded largely by Space Florida, the state’s aerospace economic development agency, and could eventually house up to 300 workers, according to news reports. Other companies are in the works, but local officials say they can’t disclose them at this time. But nearby Baldwin County, Ala., is building a 3,000-acre industrial park, known as a megasite, near Bay Minette. The site, not far from another huge park in north Mobile County, is nestled between Interstate 65 and a rail line and is aimed at attracting suppliers for Airbus and for the automobile manufacturers that now dot the landscape across Alabama. Baldwin County officials made the site possible by spending $32 million in 2012 to purchase the land. Such a site will undoubtedly lead to spinoff companies and jobs for Pensacolians, but it’s also more competition for attracting industry to the Panhandle, Luth said. Pensacola has worked similar site deals, but on a much smaller scale. Escambia County spent almost $2 million to buy 600 acres in Santa Rosa County so it can be swapped with the U.S. Navy for a helicopter-training field. The Navy’s existing field in Beulah can then be used for a commerce park that will house another expansion for Navy Federal Credit Union’s burgeoning campus. That park could eventually hold as many as 4,000 jobs, according to news reports. Other sites are in the works and can’t be disclosed, chamber leaders said. But can Pensacola do more to carve out a niche? The Palm Beach, Tampa and Orlando communities built biomedical clusters around research universities and the existing supply of scientists and grad students. University of West Florida is considered a regional university and has only one doctoral degree program, in education. That means it does not have the science and engineering graduate and post-doctoral students that some high-tech companies need, nor does it have the tech incubators and venture capital pipelines that major research universities put in place long ago, said Michael Huggins, interim dean of the College of Arts & Sciences at UWF. “That’s just not who we are,” Huggins said. “Our focus is getting undergraduates ready for the job market, or for a graduate school that is at the research level.”

A robotics hub?

Private sector support key here