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Category: Business/Technology

Excerpts from recent Wisconsin editorials

Posted on
AP

We have seen Foxconn make plans for “innovation centers” here in Racine, in Madison, Green Bay, Milwaukee and Eau Claire to support its high tech plant plans; we have seen it partner with the University of Wisconsin-Madison and with local universities and colleges to enhance training and skill development for workers and system processes; we have seen Foxconn pledge to mitigate environmental impacts by developing a zero liquid discharge wastewater treatment system that will more than halve its water needs at the Mount Pleasant campus — a state of the art system that was not required in its contract with Wisconsin.

Man with a plan

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Isthmus

For an executive who just watched a half-billion dollars swirl down the drain, Erik Iverson is a cool cucumber. Just maybe the right guy at a crucial moment for the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation.

Madison levels up: A guide to the exploding game development scene

Posted on
Isthmus

You don’t really see it until it’s all in one place.

That was certainly the case in mid-October, when more than 400 game developers from Madison and the Midwest converged at the second edition of M+Dev, the game developers’ conference held annually here. As the assembled masses networked and swapped personal stories, it was hard not to feel — and impossible not to see — an ongoing sense of critical mass.

Model of dysfunction

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Isthmus

UW-Madison’s Discovery To Product program was launched in 2013 asking the still vital question: What could be done to bring the great breakthroughs produced by the nation’s sixth largest research university to the broader public?

How too much confidence can benefit entrepreneurs

Posted on
Futurity

Elfenbein and Hart Posen of the University of Wisconsin first struck upon this course of study while together at the Darden-Cambridge Judged Entrepreneurship Conference in London in 2015. Over dinner in Cambridge’s Christ’s College dining hall, they decided to put a team together to emphasize their scholarly strengths.

Foxconn Institute of Technology at the University of Wisconsin

Posted on
VOA Chinese

In addition to establishing the Wiscon Valley Technology Park in Racine County, Wisconsin, the Hon Hai Foxconn Group in Taiwan is also cultivating more scientific and technological talents through cooperation with local universities. This is the School of Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. We interviewed the Dean of the School of Engineering and asked him to talk about cooperation with Foxconn. (In Chinese.)

The top business schools for high-paying tech jobs

Posted on
eFinancialCareers

Noted: Wisconsin only ranked as the 42nd best overall business school in the U.S., with its compensation figures in other industries falling well below the $130k average for tech. For example, Wisconsin Business School grads who took a job in finance earned a median salary of roughly $90k, well behind the $150k average for Stanford and Harvard MBAs. But Wisconsin appears to be your best bet in the Midwest for a high-paying tech job. And tuition is only around $38k, half that of Harvard.

UW’s innovation leader

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Isthmus

Robert Golden, dean of the UW-Madison’s School of Medicine and Public Health for the past dozen years, leaned into the question as if he wanted no doubt to exist on where he stood. We were in his office in a campus building located a stone’s throw away from University Hospital.

Foxconn considers bringing Chinese personnel to Wisconsin as US labor market tightens

Posted on
Fox Business

Ian Robertson, head of the engineering school at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said that even without Foxconn, the state has a challenge attracting enough engineers.  “If you look at our numbers, the answer is no,” said Mr. Robertson, about whether there are enough engineers to supply Foxconn at this stage. The school of engineering currently has 4,500 undergraduates and 1,400 graduate students, he said.

Why do we have a 30-year mortgage, anyway?

Posted on
Marketplace

Then came the Federal Housing Administration, which insured mortgages against default and set new standards for those loans. Hello, 15-year mortgage. “And then basically the FHA kind of keeps pushing it to 20 years, and then 25, and then 30,” said Andra Ghent, who teaches real estate finance at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

UW’s challenge: Why does the world-class research institution struggle to work with industry?

Posted on
Isthmus

Noted: Part I in a series.

It’s a story that Madison loves to hear.

Two plucky entrepreneurs, Kevin Conroy and Manesh Arora, are hired in 2009 to revive a moribund health-tech startup in Boston. They have the temerity to move it from the best-known metropolis in the country for medical innovation to the much smaller Madison, where Conroy had run Third Wave Technologies. Their company had but two employees.

UW’s challenge

Posted on
Isthmus

It’s a story that Madison loves to hear. Two plucky entrepreneurs, Kevin Conroy and Manesh Arora, are hired in 2009 to revive a moribund health-tech startup in Boston. They have the temerity to move it from the best-known metropolis in the country for medical innovation to the much smaller Madison, where Conroy had run Third Wave Technologies. Their company had but two employees.

Free program supports women in building construction trades

Posted on
NBC-15

Getting more women into construction, that’s the goal of new pre-apprenticeship program in our area.

The UW School for Workers and Workforce Development Board of South Central Wisconsin (WDBSCW) is introducing Madison Women In Trades, a series to recruit more women into careers like electricians, carpenters and heavy equipment operators. Applications are being accepted now and the program is free for up to 20 women. It is sponsored by grant money from the state to the University of Wisconsin system.

Charting a path with private-label

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Drug Store News

Quoted: “Once you get to that kind of industry concentration, it’s not about differentiation, it’s about pricing power,” said Hart E. Posen, an associate professor of management at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Business. “With two or three big competitors dominating the industry, it’s not about rivalry because one firm knows that if they lower prices, the other firm will have to lower prices. If one firm invests in substantial differentiation, then the other firm will — and no one will necessarily be better off.”

Apple Wins Appeal in Patent Suit With UW Madison

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Inside Higher Education

Apple won its appeal of a patent infringement case brought against the company in 2014 by the University of Wisconsin at Madison, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported. A federal appellate court in Washington, D.C., threw out part of the $506 million in damages originally awarded to the university by a federal court in Madison. It’s unclear how much has been thrown out.

How a ‘solar battery’ could bring electricity to rural areas

Posted on
The Verge

The problem of energy storage has led to many creative solutions, like giant batteries. For a paper published today in the journal Chem, scientists trying to improve the solar cells themselves developed an integrated battery that works in three different ways. It can work like a normal solar cell by converting sunlight to electricity immediately, explains study author Song Jin, a chemist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. It can store the solar energy, or it can simply be charged like a normal battery.

First-time home buyers struggle in tight housing market

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Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Quoted: Despite the shortage, housing in Wisconsin is particularly affordable right now, said Mark Eppli, director of the Graaskamp Center for Real Estate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

The average cost of a house in the portion of the state that runs roughly from Fond du Lac to Green Bay in July was $157,000. The mortgage interest rate was about 4.5 percent, according to Eppli.

“In the state of Wisconsin, housing is really affordable (now),” Eppli said. “You need a job that makes $20 an hour; you could buy an average home in Appleton.”

Would more “skin-in-game” have prevented Lehman Brothers’ collapse?

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The Republic

Noted: Future debt crises may be inevitable, but who pays the piper could mitigate the damage. So says a new paper by Dean Corbae (University of Wisconsin) and Ross Levine (University of California) presented at this year’s Jackson Hole Economic Symposium, “Competition, Stability and Efficiency in Financial Markets” https://www.kansascityfed.org/~/media/files/publicat/sympos/2018/jh080818revised.pdf?la=en, which suggests banks operate more like partnerships, with senior executives having “material skin-in-the game, so that those determining bank risk have a significant proportion of their personal wealth exposed to those risks.”

It’s Getting Harder for International STEM Students to Find Work After Graduation

Posted on
Atlantic Monthly

Noted: The University of Wisconsin-Madison advertises that two of its specialized MBA programs, in operations and technology management and supply-chain management, were the first U.S. MBA programs to earn stem designations. Greg DeCroix, the director of the MBA in supply-chain management, told me in an email, “We are seeing very high-caliber international applicants these past few years—excellent academic credentials and great work experience—and we believe the stem designation has contributed to that.”

Touch Anything And Everything

Posted on
Hackaday

At the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of California, San Diego, researchers have gone the extra mile to make advanced backscatter devices, and these new tags don’t need the discrete components we have seen in previous versions. They are calling it LiveTag, and it doesn’t need anything aside from a layer of foil printed or etched on a flexible ceramic-PTEF laminate. PTEF is mostly seen in the RF sector as a substrate for circuit boards.

UW Gets $10 Million Grant to Diversify STEM Faculty

Posted on
Madison365

To broaden participation in STEM programs and fields, the National Science Foundation has awarded a five-year, $10 million INCLUDES Alliance grant to be co-led by UW-Madison’s Center for the Integration of Research, Teaching, and Learning (CIRTL) and the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities.