Category: Business/Technology

Dear Editor: The smoking ban may be very useful in dealing with the downtown bar owners and the Tavern League. The city and the university spend an inordinate amount of time trying to find solutions to Halloween that will protect private property and public safety.

They may never have the right answers, but unless the tavern owners do then they had better assist the city and university.

Since the liquor sellers are really the only ones to profit from Halloween downtown, they need to bear the costs currently borne by property taxpayers as a whole.

Quoted: John Hoffmire, director of the Center on Business and Poverty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Wisconsin’s economy will continue to grow next year, although a bit more slowly than the rest of the nation, Donald A. Nichols said at a semi-annual conference Friday. In fact, the state, led by a strong manufacturing sector, will continue to close its per capita income gap with the U.S. in 2006, said Nichols, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and leading expert of the state economy.

Harvard College and the University of Wisconsin now tie for the most CEOs – 15 – on the list, according to Spencer Stuart.

UC Irvine has chosen the head of a University of Wisconsin real estate program as the executive director of its Center for Real Estate.

Kerry Vandell, who runs the Grasskamp Real Estate program at the Madison, Wis., campus, will begin his UCI duties full time in July, UCI officials said. (Registration required.)

With savings rates for Americans at an all-time low ââ?¬â?? even in negative territory ââ?¬â?? Ted Beck is going to have his work cut out for him in his new job.

Beck, who has been associate dean for executive education and corporate relations since 1999, will take over next month as president and CEO of the National Endowment for Financial Education.

Dane County has to look beyond its borders as it plans for the next half-century of growth and service to Wisconsin, according to one of the state’s leading economists.

Terry Ludeman, chief of the Office of Economic Advisors in the Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development, said the Madison area is one of about 100 dynamic metropolitan communities in America and needs to think beyond county lines as the 21st century progresses.

….Madison has the right kind of stuff, he said, including a good quality of life, a major university, a highly educated population and an infrastructure to make the community grow, not just via highways but by moving knowledge around through an advanced communications system like the Internet.

On the eastern edge of the University of Wisconsin campus in Madison sits what is considered one of the best destinations in the world for executive education programs.

The Fluno Center, opened in March 2000, has been included for four years running in the London-based Financial Times’ annual ranking of the world’s top 40 executive education programs. The rankings include categories related to academic offerings, facilities, and food and accommodation

Two years ago, the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Business was in trouble. Like many of its peers, it had seen full-time applications drop 30% in three years, and the situation was likely to get worse. So Michael M. Knetter did something a lot more deans are doing these days: He specialized.

NEW YORK – For many small-business owners, schools cranking out M.B.A.s are hopelessly removed from the nits and grits of making a profit.

The University of Wisconsin-Madison runs the Small Business Development Center, one of 13 centers statewide.

It’s been a long, hot summer for UW-Madison chancellor John Wiley, who’s taken heat from the Legislature over his handling of an extended paid leave for a top administrator.

But Wiley, an engineer by training, had a chance Wednesday to flaunt perhaps the proudest accomplishment of his five years at the helm: completion of a state-of-the-art heating and cooling facility for campus buildings.

Quoted: University of Wisconsin-Madison business professor Kerry Vandell, director of the school’s Center for Urban Land Economics Research.

Health, education and culture have kept the bulldozers and backhoes rumbling throughout Dane County this summer.
And, after a three-year slowdown, office buildings with space to lease are taking root all around the area.

In the city of Madison, nonresidential building projects initiated from July 2004 through June 2005 saw a whopping 93.4 percent leap over the previous 12 months.

In the last few years, the number of technology-based start-ups in Wisconsin has grown rapidly, creating opportunities for leaders who want the thrill of building a company despite the risk that nearly 6 of 10 new businesses fail.

Ball State University officials took their time to find a new director of the school’s nationally ranked entrepreneurship program. But they believe they now have their man. The school hired Larry Cox, 51, who has been director of the University of Wisconsin Weinert Center for Entrepreneurship since January 2003. He starts Aug. 22.

Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison will use $16 million from the federal government to find ways to improve the flow of goods through the upper Midwest.

Tony Escarcega spent 20 hours trolling the patent archives of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s technology transfer arm before finding five ideas he thought could spawn a good company. He talked to all five inventors and whittled the list down to one promising technology: a large-molecule-drug delivery patch. Escarcega became partners with a graduate student working on the technology, and the two spent five months tweaking a business plan. The result is Ratio – a start-up biotech company that won the $10,000 prize in UW-Madison’s G. Steven Burrill Technology Business Plan Competition.

Plans for an addition to Grainger Hall that would house graduate programs in the UW-Madison School of Business are being redesigned as a cost-saving move after bids for the project came in over budget.

“In a time of tight resources, we felt that a redesign would deliver more value, even though it will delay the building’s opening,” said Alan Fish, associate vice chancellor for facilities.

The lowest bids came in at $47.3 million, $6.8 million higher than the project’s budget.

Larry W. Cox, director of the UW-Madison Business School�s Weinert Center for Entrepreneurship for the past two-and-one-half years, is leaving his post to teach at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana.

Cox will also head the school�s Midwest Entrepreneurial Education Center, which is ranked fourth in the nation behind MIT�s entrepreneur center.

with one of China’s leading business schools that will provide the school with a $25,000 annually renewable grant to advance the study of risk management, insurance and finance.

The agreement signed by president and CEO Jeff Post with the University of International Business and Economics (UIBE) in Beijing was signed on Post’s recent trip to China, his first since assuming the leadership of CUNA Mutual in January. The grant is being coordinated through UIBE’s partnership with the UW-Madison.