Convergence

The Gulf Breeze News offers a concise overview of the 16-county, “Great Northwest” Florida WIRED project. While not revealing anything particularly new, the article did a good job touching the high points. I especially liked their program options and target industry listing:

The WIRED initiative for Northwest Florida includes:

• Entrepreneurship development designed to enable qualifying start-up companies to secure seed capital.
• Grants enabling job training for new and existing businesses in the target industries.
• Secondary education academy development for entrylevel employment in selected industries or accelerated college preparation in the subject areas of math and science.
• Outreach programs to educate and attract students of all ages into training programs to meet workforce demands.
• Strategic development component designed to ensure workforce development programs are developing skills necessary to meet current and future target industry needs.

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The target industries as defined by the state are:

• Aerospace and defense
• Medical device manufacturing, biotechnology and health services where 70 percent of the company’s revenue is generated by sales outside of the Northwest Florida region.
• Information technology, software development and Electronics engineering.
• Construction materials manufacturing
• Distribution activities that support the target industries.