Category: Business/Technology

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.

Overseeing a team of employees may be a no-brainer for an experienced business executive, but for an engineer whose skills and education have focused on technical subjects, making the transition to a supervisory role can be daunting.
“A lot of engineers and scientists are successful in college when you crank out great reports and numbers, and you don’t always necessarily have to work on a team,” said Jan Kucher, senior project engineer at the Madison engineering firm RMT.

A panel of scientists, concerned about the remote possibility of instilling human traits in animals, has recommended caution in efforts to implant embryonic stem cells in the brains of monkeys and apes.

Quoted: Steven Krauth, academic curator of the University of Wisconsin’s Insect Research Center.

“Men seem to have a hard time understanding women, and it really is nice to have someone understand you,” says Jenny Bryers, a UW- Madison graduate student. “I don’t think losing a friendship is necessarily worse for women than for men, but we probably let it bother us more. Women generally let things bother them more than men, especially if it’s something we have no control over, something we can’t change.”

Gaylord Nelson, a former Wisconsin governor and U.S. senator, died Sunday at the age of 89. He was an eloquent defender of the natural world and a man who brought skill and grace to the practice of politics.
Nelson died of cardiovascular failure at his home in Kensington, Md., a Washington, D.C., suburb. He will always be known as the founder of Earth Day.

Preliminary placement figures for graduates of UW-Madison’s MBA program are up about 20 percent over last year, and graduates are commanding salaries that average nearly $73,000 ââ?¬â?? an increase of almost 5 percent from 2004.

That�s the word from Blair Sanford, director of the school�s Graduate Career Services office. She attributes improved job numbers for 2005 full-time MBA graduates to an improved economy and a refining of the program�s curriculum.