MADISON – Demand for ââ?¬Å?incubatorââ?¬Â space for early-stage technology companies will lead to a $1 million renovation at the MGE Innovation Center in University Research Park, director Mark Bugher announced Wednesday.
Twenty suites ranging from about 700 square feet to nearly double that size will be added on the east side of the Innovation Center, 510 Charmany Drive, in space being vacated by the move of Epic Health Systems to its new headquarters in Verona. Construction begins Monday.
The Recording Industry Association of America today filed a new round of lawsuits against 754 people, including at least one person in Madison, for illegal music sharing using the Internet.
….Despite a suit being filed in Madison, in its list of 12 colleges where network users are targeted, it did not include students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
A top UW-Madison researcher who has worked for the Pfizer drug company said Tuesday that firms using stem cells to test and create new drugs could generate more than $3.6 billion in revenues by 2020.
And Wisconsin could be home to new companies doing doing that work, thanks to a wealth of scientific experts here, said Dr. Gabriela Cezar, who spoke at a Wisconsin Innovation Network luncheon.
Madison’s rapidly growing University Research Park is expanding again, providing additional space for young companies that spin out of research discoveries at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
The University of California on Monday unveiled its next big thing in innovation: a huge new institute that partners academia and industry, with the goal of speeding products to patients.
Craig January, who comfortably wears the hats of both scientist and heart doctor at UW-Madison, has had numerous chances to go into business.
But January, who developed a novel method to test drugs for heart toxicity in the late 1990s, resisted them ââ?¬â?? until recently.
NimbleGen Systems Inc., a 6-year-old company spun out of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, developed a gene chip that is used to identify how genes work. Management and the company’s investors say these gene chips have the potential to revolutionize genetic research.
….The Bolz Center (for Arts Administration), founded in 1969, helps prepare students for negotiating the rocky terrain of managing arts programs in the post-boom period. Even as Madison upgrades its arts facilities, these are difficult times for arts organizations, said Andrew Taylor, the director of the program.
“It’s a very different economy than we’re used to,” said Taylor, who noted that many community arts programs were born in the 1970s and grew in the next two decades. “The wealth isn’t there anymore.”
Business School Dean Michael Knetter changed the program from a master of arts to a master of business administration two years ago. It was in keeping with the school’s overall decision to offer specialized MBA programs, which Knetter believes make students more marketable once they graduate.
Colleges created a record number of start-up companies based on the inventions of their professors and students in the 2004 fiscal year, and they collected more than $1-billion in revenues from licenses on a host of new drugs, agricultural products, high-tech components, and other breakthrough technologies, according to a report released in November.
During Wednesday’s PSC meeting, Commissioner Mark Meyer praised MGE for keeping operational costs down. Almost all of the rate increase will go to pay for fuel and the new power plant on the UW-Madison campus.
Santa is a Badger fan. Why else would he wear all that red and white? And so it is entirely appropriate to give Badger-booster gifts to Grinches everywhere.
Fan obsession has many outlets – just look at “Star Trek.” And yet my Spock ears are not socially acceptable, but my official UW marching band mesh shorts – with “Eat a Rock” printed on the rump – are. For some reason, taste takes a holiday when it comes to school loyalty. (As one unnamed source told me while researching this article, “You’re telling me! I gotta sell this stuff.”) Still, some Badger booster items are fun, and a lot of it is downright neat.
The National Institutes of Health has awarded BellBrook Labs a $250,000 Phase I SBIR grant that will aid development of a microscale mammary tissue model to accelerate the understanding and treatment of breast cancer.
The work originates in the laboratory of Dr. David Beebe of the UW-Madison Department of Biomedical Engineering.
American Family Mutual Insurance Co. has been hit with a nearly $3 million verdict in a case involving a former University of Colorado professor and UW-Madison graduate who was seriously injured in a car crash.
A jury in Boulder, Colo., granted the award to Dominic Peressini. It’s believed to be the largest bad-faith verdict ever against an auto insurer over lost wages in Colorado.
It’s nice to see the Republican-run state Legislature focusing on the economy with the same fervor it so often wastes on the divisive issues of “God, guns and gays.”
Sen. Ted Kanavas, R-Brookfield, along with top Republicans in both houses, last week unveiled a wide- ranging “Invest Wisconsin” plan that deserves close attention.
Colleges created a record number of start-up companies based on the inventions of their professors and students in the 2004 fiscal year, and they collected more than $1-billion in revenues from licenses on a host of new drugs, agricultural products, high-tech components, and other breakthrough technologies, according to a survey scheduled for release today.
When Winslow Sargeant’s term ended at the National Science Foundation this year, he could have gone anywhere.
He chose Madison. And that says a lot, said John Neis, managing partner at Venture Investors LLC, where Sargeant is becoming the fifth partner.
Sargeant, who earned his doctorate in computer and electrical engineering at UW-Madison, is a Dot-Com Bubble survivor with a wealth of hard-earned entrepreneurial experience and a Rolodex bulging with prime contacts from three years with the NSF’s Small Business Innovation Research program.
When he moves to Madison from Washington, D.C., next May, Winslow Sargeant will become a big fish in a relatively small pond.
As a well-to-do African-American with a prestigious and influential position, the newest partner at Venture Investors LLC inevitably will be looked upon to take a leadership role in the community.
New, bigger companies and the jobs they bring to Wisconsin won’t ever materialize without wholesale changes in the state’s policies toward business, lawmakers said on Wednesday.
With that in mind, Republican statehouse leaders renewed their support for a series of proposals that would steer nearly $55 million in taxpayer funding to both startup entrepreneurs and major industries alike.
A bill that would make it easier for University of Wisconsin professors to cash in on their research is part of a package of “Invest Wisconsin” legislation announced by Republican legislators today.
Other laws – some already introduced and others to come – would create wide-ranging tax credits and exemptions aimed at promoting investments in high-technology projects and businesses.
MatriLab, a biotech start-up company with one foot in Madison and the other in Milwaukee, is part of the new “tech corridor” taking shape between the two cities.
Basic scientific research is being done at UW-Madison, while clinical work is taking place in Milwaukee.
The company, which makes an innovative drug delivery product for wounds, stems from a partnership that includes scientists, clinicians and management consultants.
Dear Editor: Your article Friday on the massive pro-divestment-from-Israel outcry at the recent UW investment hearings gives exactly the same amount of space to the (very few) people with the (very bad) anti-divestment arguments as to the (very many) people with the (very good) pro-divestment arguments.
During the South Africa divestment campaign, when a huge crowd favored divestment and only a few opposed it, would The Capital Times have given equal space to the tiny pro-apartheid minority? If not, why is The Capital Times, a supposedly left-leaning paper, shilling for the tiny pro-Israeli-apartheid minority who attended the hearings?….
Kevin Barrett, coordinator, Muslim-Jewish-Christian Alliance for 9/11 Truth, Madison
ââ?¬Â¢ Kudos to recent UW-Madison grad Anand Chhatpar, just named one of Business Week Online’s “25 Top Entrepreneurs under 25.” Chhatpar is founder and CEO of BrainReactions, an innovation consulting firm based here. He’s originally from Bombay, India, and came to Madison in fall 2001 to study chemical engineering.
University Partners is renovating the five private dorms serving UW-Madison students that it acquired from Steve Brown Apartments of Madison.
University Partners, a subsidiary of Dallas-based FirstWorthing, acquired the Highlander, Statesider, Langdon, The Towers and The Regent in 2004, and is taking over management of them on Jan. 1.
The company that sped up pulls of draft beer at sports stadiums around the country with its Turbo Tap nozzle is bringing the technology to rec rooms across America.
“It brings the project back to our roots,” said inventor Matthew Younkle, the company’s president and chief technology officer, who came up with the idea with partner Kristofer Dressler when they were students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
A study that will be released by Milwaukee Women inc today suggests that women have made little or no progress in the executive suites and boardrooms of Wisconsin’s biggest companies in the last two years.
It was prepared by Van Do and Belinda Bao, both graduate students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison business school.
Protesters packed a hearing Thursday on the University of Wisconsin’s investment portfolio, encouraging the Board of Regents to divest from Israel.
Many held Palestinian flags, as speaker after speaker called for the university to divest from companies that do business with the Israeli military. They argued, for example, that Caterpillar makes bulldozers that are used to knock down houses of families of suspected Palestinian terrorists. And Lockheed Martin supplies the Israeli Air Force.
….The UW Board of Regents’ Business and Finance Committee held its annual forum on trust funds at Grainger Hall, with committee members, as usual, sitting quietly at a table in front while members of the public said their piece.
Quoted: Mason Carpenter, UW- Madison associate professor of management and human resources.
How do you get into the business of dairy farming?
That question has been asked for a hundred years. And I remember the answers given by my ag economics professor many decades ago when I was a freshman at the University of Wisconsin in the College of Agriculture.
….Craig Carncross, a 1999 UW-Madison dairy science graduate, made up his mind to become a dairy farmer and is doing it as part of a family corporation.
Steve Brown Apartments’ five private dorms serving UW-Madison students will be under new management with new names effective Jan. 1, the new management company announced today.
University Partners, a subsidiary of Dallas-based FirstWorthing, said it acquired the Highlander, Statesider, Langdon, The Towers and The Regent in 2004, with Steve Brown Apartments continuing to manage the properties.
University of Wisconsin-Madison Chancellor John Wiley says he hasn’t seen any evidence that unionization would lead to better working conditions for apparel factory workers.
But his office is still considering a proposal that would require apparel companies that make university logo clothing to use union labor.
The Associated Students of Madison is urging Wiley to adopt the policy, which was endorsed 9-0 last month by the UW’s Labor Licensing Policy Committee.
University Research Park has forged a “sister park” agreement with the Frankfort Biotechnology Innovation Center in Frankfort, Germany, in Wisconsin’s sister state of Hesse.
A memorandum of understanding between the two research parks was signed in Frankfort by UW-Madison Chancellor John Wiley, University Research Park Director Mark Bugher and Christian Garbe, managing director of the Frankfort Biotechnology Innovation Center.
The Fitchburg Technology Campus has broken ground on a second building to house early stage companies that will have Imago Scientific Instruments as its anchor tenant – the second local nanotechnology company to move onto the campus.
As Wisconsin slides toward its worst year in a decade for attracting venture capital, the importance of the State Investment Board’s role in helping to fill the state’s venture void looms large.
The board, which manages more than $70 billion in government employee pension money and other state assets, started talking earlier this fall about increasing the amount it devotes to venture capital the money that bankrolls entrepreneurs as they build fledgling businesses.
In a novel attempt to retain educated professionals and support local entrepreneurship, the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire Foundation is launching an angel fund that will invest in companies that are founded by recent graduates and located in the Chippewa Valley.
Quotes Charles Hoslet, managing director of corporate relations at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
It’s a vexing problem for Wisconsin’s economy: Researchers at UW-Madison turn out top technology, in fields ranging from stem cells to electronics, but entrepreneurs often have trouble finding the money to take those innovations to market.
But a new effort to organize angels, wealthy investors in early-stage technology companies, is providing some answers to that conundrum, said Lorrie Keating Heinemann, the state’s top banking and securities regulator.
Wisconsin also should better market its human capital, which is highly educated and skilled, especially around UW-Madison.
The University of Wisconsin at Madison, $1.591-billion as of October 17 (increase of $21.4-million in the last month); the goal was $1.5-billion by 2007.
Profile: Quantum Devices, a UW-Madison spinoff company based in Barneveld.
A committee of accounting experts published new guidance yesterday that it hopes will reduce the cost for small companies to document that their internal financial controls are adequate.
“It was important for us to demonstrate how smaller public companies can implement effective internal control in a different manner than do their larger counterparts,” said Larry E. Rittenberg, the chairman of the group, the Committee of Sponsoring Organizations of the Treadway Commission, and an accounting professor at the University of Wisconsin.
The new specialist degrees, however, have been designed from the ground up to be directly relevant to a particular business sector or industry.
One high-profile example is the MBA offerings at the University of Wisconsin’s Madison School of Business. Students entering the school’s course can choose from one of 14 different areas of specialisation. Areas range from arts administration and marketing research to supply chain management and real estate.
School dean, Michael Knetter, says the school has made a conscious effort to appeal to students who have a clear career objective.
Wisconsin’s abysmal record of venture funding activity continued in the third quarter, and state companies are on their way to having their worst year in a decade for raising venture capital.
Just three state companies – all in the Madison area – raised a total of $9.68 million, according to the MoneyTree Survey by PricewaterhouseCoopers, Thomson Venture Economics and the National Venture Capital Association.
(MADISON) The University of Wisconsin Board of Regents recently voted to allow a group of students to handle more than 30 million dollars of investments on behalf of the University. Itââ?¬â?¢s a hands-on experiment that they hope will be a good — and profitable — learning experience.
10/24/05
Madison has a ways to go to live up to its full potential as model city for business philanthropy. We need to say for fear that we rest on the laurels on those shining examples of corporate citizenship we are so fortunate to have in our midst. But we have enough to give hope to the goal of creating such a model city. And right in the middle of the effort we are again reminded is the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Business.
(MADISON) The University of Wisconsin-Madison Business School ranks among the world�s top schools for offering classes on social and environmental issues. The newly- developed classes teach students about the human costs of doing business. (Second item.)
The latest Wisconsin Policy Research Institute poll tells us that Wisconsinites are rapidly losing confidence in their elected officials. In a state that once enjoyed a national reputation for clean politics, only 9 percent of those surveyed thought that the standard for ethics in state government was improving while 46 percent thought it was declining.
Even more disheartening were the answers to the question about whose interests elected officials serve. Only 6 percent of those surveyed thought that elected officials represented their interests.
The citizens of Wisconsin have reason to be concerned. Consider the growing controversy surrounding the awarding of a three-year contract – worth up to $240,000 annually – to make travel arrangements for the state.
Bioscience is one of the fastest growing industries in Wisconsin, a new report maintains, although it has a long way to go to surpass manufacturing, agriculture and tourism as the state’s top industry.
The report, Bioscience Wisconsin 2006, issued by the Wisconsin Association for Biomedical Research & Education, measures economic growth in bioscience research, development and industry in the state.
Slide that beer down the counter and make way for the stem cells.
A report shows bioscience research and industry provide jobs for more than 26,000 people in Wisconsin and add more than $6.9 billion to the state’s economy.
In the past two years, Wisconsin’s growing bioscience industry surpassed beer as an economic force in the state, according to a report to be released Wednesday in Madison.
Twenty students at UW- Madison have more than $40 million in their hands.
It may sound like they won the lottery, but in truth, it’s just part of their education – to invest more money than most of us will ever see.
The UW-Madison School of Business has been ranked among the world’s top schools for its MBA offerings in social and environmental issues.
Wisconsin was 16th among U.S. business schools and 28th overall in the Beyond Grey Pinstripesranking by the World Resources Institute and the Aspen Institute. The rating measures how well MBA programs equip students with an understanding of the social, environmental and economic perspectives required for business success in a global economy.
ST. PAUL (AP) – It’s not just farm kids in the region’s agriculture colleges anymore.
It’s students like Jillian Rankins from Eau Claire, Wis., a sophomore at the University of Minnesota who hadn’t heard of the FFA future farmers group before she got to college. Her studies are in management and economics, not crops and livestock.
Rankins and her fellow students from urban backgrounds are welcomed by agriculture colleges as they reposition themselves to provide for a world that needs fewer dairy farmers and agronomists and more food scientists, veterinarians and nutritionists.
Richard Shaten sees both sides. Though ethanol carries its own problems, burning ethanol blends releases less soot and carbon monoxide into the air than gasoline, said Shaten, a faculty associate who teaches energy economics at UW-Madison’s Gaylord Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies.
“I believe that every gallon of gasoline that is displaced by a gallon of ethanol lets us all breathe easier,” he said.
The campaigns of both of Gov. Jim Doyle’s potential Republican opponents in the 2006 election called Friday for the administration to rebid a state contract awarded to a travel agency whose executives donated money to his re-election campaign.
Doyle again rejected the calls to rebid the contract awarded to Glendale-based Adelman Travel Group.
Local, state and federal authorities are investigating the process for awarding the three-year contract to issue airline tickets for state employees. The probe announced Thursday will look into whether $20,000 in donations from Adelman executives played any role in the contract, which could be worth $250,000 a year.
College senior Amy Block was stunned to learn in her recent personal finance class how much it costs her over the long run when she pays only the minimum required amount on her credit card bill.
State, federal and Dane County law enforcement officials have launched a joint inquiry following media reports that Gov. Jim Doyle received $20,000 in campaign donations from executives of a travel agency around the time it won a state contract.
Doyle, a Democrat, has insisted the donations played no role in Milwaukee-based Adelman Travel Group winning the contract and reiterated it Thursday after the authorities announced their investigation. He said he had nothing to do with the selection process and the firm was picked because it was the cheapest bid, saving taxpayers money.
A travel agency is now questioning why it lost a contract to sell airline tickets to state workers after reports that leaders at the winning company gave $20,000 to the governor’s campaign in the months surrounding the bidding process.
Gov. Jim Doyle and his administration have steadfastly maintained the contract was awarded to Milwaukee-based Adelman Travel Group fairly after the company’s final bid came in $30,000 cheaper.
(CALS Associate Dean Frank Kooistra, a member of the selection committee, is quoted.)
UW-Madison students Nick O’Brien and Mitch Nick want to start a company. So far, all they have in hand is an idea they’ve been researching for more than a year: a system to help firefighters find their way out of smoke-blinded buildings.
There’s a new “E” in E-business: Engagement.
“Time is more precious than money,” eMarketer CEO Geoff Ramsey told the crowd attending the 8th annual UW E-Business Institute’s E-Business Best Practices & Emerging Technologies Conference Tuesday at the Monona Terrace Convention Center.
The conference aimed to get attendees to think about how to better understand the technologies their companies use.
Wisconsin is finally gaining some traction in the high-paying technology job world.
A report issued today by the Wisconsin Technology Council shows the state, while still lagging, is improving its standing among the 50 states when it comes to producing patents, creating high-tech jobs and investing in research and development.
Wisconsin is inching forward in its effort to morph into a high-tech state, but it still lags the nation in technology jobs, a new report shows.
The report, to be presented today at the Early Stage Symposium at Monona Terrace, shows Wisconsin scientists and engineers are racking up more patents per capita than most other states, and research funding is steadily rising.
