St Pete Innovation District celebrates 10 years, looks to future The St. Pete Innovation District is a hub of research, entrepreneurship, education, and collaboration. 2026 has already been an eventful year for the St. Petersburg Innovation District. It reached the 10th-anniversary milestone, created a road map for future growth with its first-ever master plan, and rallied to support a cornerstone member after a fire tore through the University of South Florida College of Marine Science laboratory building in early May, destroying decades of research. St. Pete is a city of residential neighborhoods and commercial districts, each with their own look and feel. Directly south of downtown, the Innovation District is 560 acres with two hospital complexes, a university campus, a marine research mecca, a business incubator, a marine and defense tech office hub, a world-renowned museum, an influential journalism institute, an airport, a port, and government, nonprofit, and private sector research organizations. “Innovation districts are really interesting,” St. Petersburg Innovation District Executive Director Alison Barlow says. “They bring together the physical place with the economic drivers – the businesses, the incubators, the accelerators – and figure out ways to network all of those together. The way I describe it is, when one of our partners is doing really cool work, they own it, they 100 percent own it. Our job is to amplify, to raise awareness, get people interested, and help them find future partners. When it’s a project that needs multiple partners working together, that’s where we’re really good. We convene them. We lead them. We coordinate.” Decade of investment The Innovation District was officially established in 2016, just as one founding partner, All Children’s Hospital, was expanding its research and academic missions as a member of the Johns Hopkins Medicine system. “It was perfect timing for us to