In April, Logue will retire from her leading role at UCF.

“The timing couldn’t be better,” Logue says. “We have no crisis, no funding gap — just a healthy business environment [for] the foreseeable future. I can walk away with peace of mind that our ‘grow your own’ approach has become the hallmark of economic development in Central Florida.”

Under Logue’s guidance, the Innovation Districts and Incubation Program has cultivated growth for hundreds of startups, resulting in thousands of jobs and tens of millions of dollars for the local economy from a medley of industries. Logue’s approach to her work has captured the attention of colleagues across the country, serving as a testament to her strong work ethic and humility.

“I’ve followed a crooked path,” Logue says, “but I’ve never forgotten where I came from.”

The Farm Girl From Arkansas

Logue learned how to drive from the seat of a tractor at age 10. She can’t begin to count how many piglets she bottle-fed or the hours she spent picking, cleaning and canning vegetables from her family’s enormous garden. Logue’s granddad ran the general store. Her father earned a degree in agricultural engineering, but didn’t stray from his rural roots where everyone knew each other as neighbors and helped each other as friends.

“My upbringing close to the Earth prepared me to work with entrepreneurs even back when I had other plans,” Logue says.

Those plans were supposed to include medical school, however, along the way she discovered the world of technology at the University of Arkansas library, where early online databases fed her hunger for knowledge. From there, Logue’s route bounced around the south — to Louisiana State University for a master’s degree, back to Arkansas to teach and eventually to the University of Florida (UF) in 1984 where she helped run an information center with rocket scientists.

“Agriculture is the original STEM field,” Logue says of the connection between farming and technology.

While at UF, she would attend occasional business conferences in Orlando, and each time she became more intrigued about the blossoming potential of the area and the young university on its east side. At one conference in the aftermath of 9/11, she heard a new strategy outlined — for the region, for UCF, and, as Logue believed, for her own career.

“The ground had shaken after 9/11,” she says. “It forced every business and municipality to change. During that conference, I heard how technology and young startups in Orlando were poised to diversify the economy beyond tourism. Everyone wanted to participate — the city, the county, private enterprise. And at the center of it all: UCF. It wasn’t just talk. Innovation would drive entrepreneurship, and entrepreneurship would grow the greater community. I’d always wanted to be in a place where I could see those kinds of long-term results.”

Laying the Groundwork for Orlando’s Economic Boom

When Logue arrived at UCF a few months later, she saw the equivalent of a big field — one incubator in one building. She felt at home. Working with entrepreneurs reminded her of planting seeds. Developing partnerships with the city and county was like watering and fertilizing.

“Just like it is when you’re growing crops, you keep watch, knowing there will be factors outside your control,” Logue says. “But you keep nurturing, keep fending off pests and focus on the harvest ahead.”

Orlando’s business culture today is very different than it was in 2002. The region once known for a busy airport and theme parks now garners global attention for technology and innovation clusters that feed a robust local economy. There’s expertise in virtual reality, augmented reality, digital twinning, modeling, simulation, gaming and theme park advancements. All of this has been spun into a wide range of business interests: education, hospitality, medicine, real estate, smart city planning and the space program. Trace any of the vendors back to their roots and you’ll probably find yourself still standing in Central Florida.

This is the fruit reaped from sowing locally, and it’s due in large part to UCF — and to Logue.

“Colleagues from around the country ask how we do this,” she says. “I tell them UCF always has a seat at the table. During conversations, you can’t tell who works for government, who works for industry and who works for UCF. It’s truly collaborative, which is helpful for entrepreneurs. At the heart of it, we share a goal to drive a better quality of life from within.”

RINI Technologies, one of the first businesses in the incubator program when Logue arrived in 2002, now offers leading research and development from a 12,000-square-foot facility just one mile from UCF’s main campus. It’s among the companies Logue and her team have helped grow from laboratory to marketplace.

The successes gained so much attention from the U.S. Department of Defense that when it recognized a need for rapid innovation in 2019, it launched the Central Florida Tech Grove and appointed Logue as director. Five years later, 11 government entities now collaborate with Tech Grove, where the primary mission to grow the defense industrial base for each entity has expanded overall economic vitality. Business leaders from around the world see the ease of integrating with other companies and government and want to know how to be a part of it.

They call the person at the center of the progress: Logue.

“It isn’t me,” she says with down-to-earth modesty. “It’s the vibrant economic environment here. I know it will be sustained long after I leave.”

Her Ambitious To-do List for Retirement

Logue plans to take online courses in history, photography and possibly artificial intelligence. There are books to read and documentaries to watch about people, WWI and WWII. She’ll vacation in Eastern Europe and visit her grandkids in Alaska. But near the top of the list is a trip she’s been thinking about for a long time. This trip will be to the pastures of Lexington, Kentucky, and the foothills and flatlands of Arkansas — home.

“Back to the place that prepared me in ways I never saw coming,” she says.

Then Logue and her husband, Ed, will return to Florida and take a breath before she makes time for a once-familiar hobby.

“I’m going to have a big garden,” she says, “and I look forward to spending a lot of time in it.”

“From the moment I heard about cities being smart, it has always been on my mind,” Agarwal says. The concept resonates for this engineering visionary because he was raised in a small town in India with unstable transportation, electric, water and drainage systems. “I had a strong feeling that a ‘smart city’ would benefit everyone living in it, for generations.”

Little did Agarwal know at the time that in 2024 he would be in Orlando, The City Beautiful, as founding director of UCF’s Urban Intelligence and Smart City Lab and coordinator of its innovative Smart Cities master’s program. He could have continued his blossoming career in any major city with a reputable university, but he came to Central Florida because he saw something fresh: under the umbrella of the Future City Initiative, researchers and students from a variety of departments who would soon be working with industry and city leaders toward a singular goal.

“Smartness,” says Agarwal, an associate professor in civil environmental and construction engineering.

Let’s just pause for a moment and address a basic question: What exactly is a smart city? The Orlando area has smart people with smart ideas. We have a university with world-renown instructors and a history of groundbreaking tech research in AR, VR, digital twinning, modeling and simulation. Yet with all of these smarts, we still live on a finite piece of land with a finite supply of water, all shared by a rapidly growing population. It doesn’t take long for such a city to become less beautiful.

Unless it’s truly smart.

“The concept of a smart city is broad, but in general it means you integrate technology to remove the negatives of daily life,” says Cameron Ford, founding director of UCF’s Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership and executive director of the Blackstone LaunchPad. “No congestion. No sanitation issues. No excess air pollutants. No problems with reliable power or water. A smart city uses foresight to improve livability, sustainability and resilience so residents can enjoy today while preparing for the uncertainties of tomorrow.”

For an example, Agarwal’s latest research provides a moving picture of what mobility within a smart city might look like: Traffic moving with the harmonious speed and efficiency of a school of fish (as opposed to the stop-and-go crawl of a caterpillar). In this city, autonomous vehicles would use sensors to transmit messages to each other and to the infrastructure. Road travel becomes cooperative and quick. It’s stress-free, and yes, friendly.

“Technology is the connective tissue between every project in a smart city,” Agarwal says, “and it requires a lot of small projects connected together. They become the digital infrastructure. You can’t necessarily see them, but they make the quality of daily life better.”

Carol Ann Logue is director of programs and operations for UCF’s Innovation Districts and Business Incubation Program. She and Ford are involved in smart city initiatives because at some point every tech-centered project, visible or invisible, comes down to business. Without investment even the smartest idea will never see the light of day.

“The cities that can pull this off have experts from every important sector intertwined into a singular ecosystem,” Logue says. “For Orlando, it’s healthcare, transportation, hospitality, education, engineering and business. We have a pipeline of young talent, intellectual property, forward-thinking research — everything is here, due in large part to UCF, to be become fully integrated, and smarter.”

Until recently, however, something crucial had been missing.

“For as long as I’ve been in Orlando, there have been frustrations that the rest of the world didn’t know about the tech capabilities here, which made it challenging to attract outside investors,” Logue says. “But that’s changing quickly.”

Logue is referring to the presence of Plug and Play, a global startup accelerator with a deep network of investors and companies able to supercharge emerging tech markets like central Florida. Plug and Play opened an Orlando office earlier in 2024 as part of a partnership with UCF, the city, Orange County, Duke Energy and Tavistock, with the goal of advancing Orlando as a smart city.

“This region’s identity as a tech market is unique,” Ford says. “We don’t have major corporate headquarters spinning out talent, like they have in Silicon Valley. However, we do have talented, ambitious students and researchers coming up with new ideas to improve urban life. They’re developing expertise learning how to turn that expertise into viable business. Plug and Play fills a critical gap by attracting corporate partners and risk capital so those tech startups can flourish.”

Logue says she’d been aware of Plug and Play for years because she’s in the world of business incubation. “They don’t just go anywhere. There has to be a culture of innovative technology for them to nurture into a smart-city ecosystem. That’s exactly what we have here.”

Plug and Play developed its first smart city cohort for Orlando in April. They invited more than two dozen companies to pitch the innovation they would bring to the smart city initiative. Of the 14 companies chosen for the cohort — some local and some from outside the area — four were founded by students, graduates and researchers from UCF: CapaciTech, which builds flexible and high-energy storage solutions; the smart mobility company ConnectedWise; Precision Periodic, which uses nanobeads for water treatment; and Fluix, an energy-saving AI-based autopilot.

“Many of the companies from outside the area that pitched said, ‘We’ve been interested in moving to Florida, but didn’t know about the tech capabilities here until Plug and Play came along,’” Logue says. “It’s been a ‘wow’ for a lot of people.”

They’ve been wowed to find out about UCF’s aforementioned Smart Cities master’s program, the only such program that fuses technology with disciplines focused on water and air quality, transportation and land development and public policy. They’ve been wowed to discover UCF working on a $26 million NSF-funded Engineering Research Center for Smart Streetscapes (CS3), and a transportation science and tech program ranked among the world’s best.

“They’re also impressed with the collaboration between experts in different fields,” Logue says, “because everyone knows collaboration is the best way to make real progress.”

Less than 10 years ago, Agarwal heard “smart city” for the first time. Today he’s helping one come together. Many students in the Smart Cities master’s program are professionals who are reskilling themselves. One is developing a smart parking system. Another is coming up with a method to ensure healthy water quality in pools. Yet another is researching a way to locate lead pipes underground so they can be removed without tearing up the landscape.

“These people have always had ideas,” Agarwal says, “and now their ideas have the potential to be grown into start-ups, then incubated, and perhaps supported through Plug and Play’s network. It’s still early, but that’s what makes this an exciting time. We’re just getting started.”