Category: Business/Technology

Coverage of a conference sponsored by the Center for Quick Response Manufacturing, which is part of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Quick-response manufacturing emphasizes reducing lead time throughout the entire production process, from design and purchasing to the manufacturing floor and deliveries.

Mentions a report last summer by the Center on Wisconsin Strategy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison showed a statewide decline in federal funding for workers, a slide that preceded the economic slowdown and budget deficits.

Eugene “Pepi” Randolph, a former UW-Madison athlete with a background in sales and the law, took over the ultimate sales job last fall: leading the state’s economic development arm.

Randolph, once captain of the Badgers baseball team, has worked for Procter & Gamble, Johnson & Johnson and the Milwaukee Brewers. In September 2004, Randolph took over for Michael Armiak as president of Forward Wisconsin, a public-private group that tries to recruit businesses.

Since the Fluno Center for Executive Education opened five years ago, UW-Madison’s executive education program defied the drag of an economic downturn and corporate belt- tightening to raise its profile and its number of students.

The program has grown by about 50 percent since the spring of 2000, which means its biggest challenge now is maintaining momentum, said UW- Madison Business School Associate Dean Ted Beck.

Mayor Dave Cieslewicz believes he sees the future of Madison architecture in five buildings.

The mayor said readers’ lists made him realize he “left out a lot of great buildings” the first time around. They included the UW Lakeshore Dorms and the UW Field House.

“The Memorial Union was on my list but I think people vote for it more for what they’ve done in the building than the building itself. It’s kind of like sex – it’s all close-ups and parts.”

Why doesn’t Dane County’s economic development corporation do more to retain and attract businesses with high-paying jobs?

The answer is as simple as it is disturbing: Unlike so many other regions across Wisconsin and the nation, Dane County doesn’t have an economic development corporation.

The glaring absence of such a force for prosperity is one of the top concerns of the Collaboration Council, a 40-member group of regional business and community leaders. The group is developing ways to promote economic growth in Dane County while preserving its quality of life.

“We are lethargic at promoting ourselves,” said University Research Park Director Mark Bugher, who heads the council’s business retention and recruitment committee. “We’ve relied too much on the public sector for our economy. Those days are over.”

A bid to preserve a historic drug store may complicate UW-Madison’s proposal for a $375 million state-of-the-art research center that will help discover drugs for some of the world’s most serious illnesses.

The state and university are proposing to build the massive, 750,000-square-foot Institute of Discovery on a wedge-shaped piece of land bordered by University and Randall avenues and West Johnson and Charter streets.

Students at Madison-area colleges might be purifying proteins or crafting computer programs in their spare time, as interns for local startup companies, a couple of years from now.

And a new organization – a Dane County economic development corporation – could be aggressively chasing pharmaceutical and engineering companies in other states, trying to lure them here, using a new “brand” identity to market the area.

MADISON — Managers at the Sheboygan-based Acuity insurance company have attended executive education courses at Harvard, the University of Chicago and other prestigious private schools.

But as far as John Signer – head of Acuity’s human resources department – is concerned, some of the best professional-level programs he has encountered are run by the UW-Madison School of Business at the Fluno Center.

UW Credit Union customers were targeted by a “phishing” identity theft scam this week, a credit union official said Wednesday. Criminals sent out emails to local residents that included the UW Credit Union logo and urged customers of the credit union to “verify personal information” by providing confidential details.

Many people think of a co- op as one of the agricultural cooperatives that have been a staple of rural life in the Upper Midwest since the mid-1800s or as one of the community grocery stores that combine organic food and social awareness.

But cooperative businesses encompass far more than grain and granola, and interest is growing, experts in the field agree.

“There are a lot of people who are beginning to think about business in different ways. They hear about the co- op model, and it appeals to them,” said Anne Reynolds, assistant director of the University of Wisconsin Center for Cooperatives.

High standards in food and accommodation are a vital part of the package in the executive education market, but there are many ways to fry an egg when it comes to providing a service.

“It’s a complete requirement, if you want to be highly regarded in executive education, that food and accommodation are first rate,” says Ted Beck, associate dean at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Business.

Instead of viewing economic development as a local issue, civic leaders in Madison, Milwaukee, Chicago and the Twin Cities ought to strengthen regional ties and work together to foster growth, according UW-Milwaukee urban planning professor Sammis White.

“It really is the Midwest against the rest,” he told a group of about 80 gathered Friday for a breakfast meeting sponsored by the UW-Madison Small Business Development Center. “If we want to succeed, we really need to take advantage of the strength that each of these areas have, and the Midwest as a whole has, in order to compete with other sections of the country.”

As the woman listened to information about filing for earned income credit on her taxes, she couldn’t believe what she’d lost.

“I’ve been ripping myself off for three years,” she repeated several times. By refiling her tax forms, the woman gained $3,000 in tax credits.

She was part of a pilot project at a Staples call center in Massachusetts to increase the disposable income of poor workers. The project, which began Feb. 1, was a test run for a program sponsored by the UW-Madison Center on Business and Poverty.

A deal appears to be in the works to straighten out the troubled downtown music venue Luther’s Blues, but there is confusion about who is currently running the show.

“We want to improve the tarnished image of the place. It is definitely tarnished,” said Michael Loveless, who lives in Seattle, Wash., and is calling himself one of the new owners.

Employees walked out, creditors say they went unpaid, and the phone lines were disconnected for a time.

It wasn’t long ago that Luther’s was the darling of the local club scene. It opened in late 2000, just a few months before the fire that destroyed O’Cayz Corral, and rose to prominence as one of a handful of live downtown music venues.

A change of operators appears to be in the works for the club at 1401 University Ave., and a power struggle has ensued. How it plays out remains to be seen, and the straight story is elusive.

With more than 250 buildings, 153 departments, 41,500 students, scores of labs, dozens of consortiums and a head-spinning number of faculty and researchers, the UW-Madison campus can be an intimidating place to navigate.

“We’ve got a large number of resources for business people, but people often don’t know where to turn,” said Noel Radomski, a policy and planning analyst in the university’s Office of Corporate Relations (OCR).

Lessons in business and philanthropy aren’t usually taught together. But a new class that just wrapped up at the UW- Madison School of Business showed MBA candidates that they can apply entrepreneurial skills to social problems.

Students who took the class “Social Entrepreneurship: Redefining Markets and Organizations” said the course opened their eyes to a world possibilities.

A new online database has been launched by the Office of Corporate Relations at UW-Madison to provide businesses and others with another tool to identify and access resources and services at the university.

The Wisconsin Business Resources Database contains links to nearly 100 offices on the Madison campus, and has a growing list of other campuses in the University of Wisconsin System. Its Web address is www.wbrd.wisc.edu.

Middleton-based Bone Care International Inc., a drug-maker that has seen its sales soar in the past two years, agreed to be bought by Genzyme Corp. for about $719 million in cash, the companies announced Wednesday. Bone Care was founded in 1987 as a division of Lunar Corp., which grew out of bone research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and was later bought by GE Medical Imaging.

Trevor Twose says he thoroughly enjoyed his days as a post-doctoral researcher at UW-Madison in the early 1970s.

“Those were interesting times for a number of reasons,” says Twose, a wry smile washing over his lean face. “Molecular biology was just breaking through. My work mostly focused on drug resistance in bacteria.”

After watching his two older brothers struggle to find work when they graduated in 2001 and 2003, fifth-year psychology major Adam Miller was prepared for a trying job hunt of his own.

But he said he started to relax when companies began contacting him in January after seeing his resume on a UW- Madison job site.

UW-Madison Business School Dean Michael Knetter also has noticed an increased interest in ethics, both from students and the general public.

“What’s changed is people are asking us about it now,” he said. “Students bring a heightened awareness of that coming in, relative to where they were before.”

Student surveys and a program review have led to major curriculum revisions in the Evening MBA program (EvMBA) at the UW-Madison School of Business.

Starting in fall 2005, incoming students will be part of a new program, streamlined and more geared to international perspectives and concerns, said Linda Uitvlugt, director of operations for the program.

The University of Wisconsin-Madison will build a coalition of colleges to encourage apparel makers to disclose more about where they make their products.

Chancellor John Wiley met on Wednesday afternoon with current and former members of the university’s Labor Licensing Committee. The committee is charged with advising Wiley’s office on matters of UW-logo licensed apparel.

Leaders from business, government, non-profits and education are aiming to grow Dane County’s economy while preserving and advancing the quality of life here by working together in the Collaboration Council.

(Chancellor John Wiley is quoted in this story.)

James Burgess, former publisher of the Wisconsin State Journal and executive vice president of Lee Enterprises, has made a $1 million gift to the UW-Madison School of Journalism to establish an endowed professorship in ethics.

The James E. Burgess Ethics in Journalism Chair will be part of an envisioned center devoted to issues of fairness, accuracy and integrity in the media. A nationwide search is planned to award the chair.