Category: Business/Technology

Business owners are meeting today to discuss the pros and cons of “going green.” UW Madison’s Business School is hosting its first “sustainability” conference to encourage companies to make real commitments to the environment.

Businesses from Harley Davidson to local cheese makers will be at the meeting. It’s hosted by the Center for Business, Environment, and Social Responsibility. Department co-chair Tom Eggert says the idea is for executives to learn from each other on what works and what doesn’t when it comes to sustainability. (Second item.)

The University of Wisconsin’s business school dean will be paid entirely with private donations starting next year.

The arrangement is made possible with a donation from UW alum Albert “Ab” Nicholas and his wife. The school’s deans will now be known as the “Albert O. Nicholas Dean of the Wisconsin School of Business.”

The dean of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Wisconsin School of Business is now an endowed deanship, thanks to a gift from longtime school supporters Albert O. Nicholas and his wife Nancy Johnson Nicholas.

The economic slowdown has hit hard in Dane County, with the highest number of businesses ever saying they won’t be able to meet expectations in 2008.

The sixth annual First Business Economic Survey of Dane County, released Wednesday by First Business Bank, showed all business sectors reported declines in seven primary economic indicators, with the service industry suffering the most.

What if doctors could take a strand of your hair and use it to find out which drugs could best treat you for high cholesterol, for example, without giving you a bad reaction?
That may be just a few years away, says an official of Cellular Dynamics International (CDI), 525 Science Drive.

The Madison stem-cell company, founded by UW-Madison researcher James Thomson, has landed $18 million in financing that will help CDI expand operations and add staff, as it works to become a world leader in the field, said chief commercial officer Chris Kendrick-Parker.

We’re glad to hear that UW-Madison Chancellor Biddy Martin is working on a constructive relationship with the board of Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce, the state’s largest business group. Martin said she has had separate meetings with the WMC’s board of directors and WMC president Jim Haney and is hoping they can focus on common interests.

Courtesy of the Wilson Law Group, an excellent estate-planning firm here in Madison, one of your correspondents attended a fascinating talk last night. The speaker was the Dean of the University of Wisconsin School of Business, Michael M. Knetter (yes, the “k” gets a little enunciation).

Knetter spoke for nearly an hour on a broad range of topics, from international trade to the credit bubble to tax policy. Here are a few highlights, in no particular order, from last night’s event:

….Thanks to the twin pillars of the University of Wisconsin and state government, Madison has historically enjoyed a leg up on the rest of the Badger State when it comes to riding out economic hard times.

But with the national economy facing unprecedented challenges and government no longer the biggest employer in town, can the region avoid the pain of this latest downturn?

“No doubt Madison and Dane County have been insulated but eventually this is going to catch up to everybody,” warned Ken Harwood, a business consultant from Verona and publisher of Wisconsin Development News.

A large stockholder is urging the board of TomoTherapy Inc. to consider selling the medical technology company or seek other alternatives to boost its stock price.

TomoTherapy, which was founded by two University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers, sells a device that uses imaging technology to increase the accuracy of radiation treatments.

The University of Wisconsin is marking Global Entrepreneurship Week this week.

University Square may be the most costly mixed-use project in city history, but hundreds of millions of dollars more are being spent by UW-Madison to develop the East Campus Gateway.
The more than $428 million project stretches from Regent Street to Lake Mendota and is part of a seven-block pedestrian mall first proposed as part of the 1908 master plan. UW-Madison officials hope the improvements will make East Campus Mall a campus centerpiece, much like Library Mall and Bascom Hill.

When the original MGE Innovation Center opened at University Research Park in 1989, Novagen was one of its first tenants.

The local startup had three employees, including co-founder Robert Mierendorf, and was a subsidiary of Pel-Freez, a Rogers, Ark., company that processes rabbit meat and manufactures biological products for scientific research.

Dropping out of college to make homemade beer didn’t look like a very good career move initially.

But Shane Welch, founder and brewmaster of Sixpoint Craft Ales, followed his passion, even though his parents were unenthusiastic about his plans to quit the University of Wisconsin-Madison to concentrate on brewing beer in the basement of his student apartment on Vilas Avenue.

….Sixpoint brews created by Welch and former college roommate Aaron Stumpf, 29, have become the toast of New York City.

Hooper’s employees also travel across the nation, working on wind-farm projects from New York to New Mexico. And its custom metal fabricators fashioned stainless-steel tubing and wires for the inner structure of a rippled glass waterfall sculpture created in 2006 by UW-Madison art professor Truman Lowe and installed in Indianapolis.

For an example of what does work, take a look at Dane County, where several hundred new businesses and thousands of new jobs have been created because of a hot entrepreneurial climate. Academic research from the University of Wisconsin-Madison is being turned into patents, licenses and business start-ups. The University Research Park, now 25 years old, is being doubled in size to raise the number of companies to 200 from 115 now.