In 1970, the UW chancellor informed the University Book Store that its lease would not be renewed. The library wanted the space for its expansion.
The Memorial Library had initially been built around the store in the 1950s without infringing on the bookstore’s space.
The high-tech and biotech firms being developed around the University of Wisconsin-Madison “aren’t enough to overwhelm the larger economy that was already in place and was growing more slowly,” agreed William A. Testa, senior economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, which serves most of Wisconsin.
Primorigen Biosciences LLC, a Madison biotech start-up company, has raised $2.45 million in a first round of financing.
Primorigen’s president is Chuck Oehler, who also held executive positions at Promega and other biotech firms, and was president and consulting executive director of the Wisconsin Biotechnology Association during a period of rapid growth.
His firm, the Oehler Group, has helped start-ups and other companies raise about $30 million, according to his biography on the Web site for the University of Wisconsin-Madison business school, where he serves on the entrepreneurship program’s advisory board.
Dear Editor: I am writing to commend letter writer Matthew McNamara for his thoughtful comments regarding the efforts by many to protect the UW Arboretum from for-profit development.
In his letter, he raises several questions and makes a strong appeal that the drive to preserve the UW Arboretum rely on “credible arguments based on facts.” I’d like to assure him that this is exactly how the “Protect the Arboretum” campaign is proceeding.
The drums pounding in any open field the city has to offer, the sound of horns bouncing off downtown buildings, buses clogging traffic around Camp Randall Stadium.
Store those sights and sounds in your head, because Drum Corps International’s World Championships won’t be back for a while. This week, DCI announced it was moving its permanent headquarters to Indianapolis and taking the championships with it beginning in 2008.
University of Wisconsin-Madison students could lose control over Union South if they don’t approve a referendum this fall to rebuild it, Wisconsin Union officials said.
A veteran researcher and administrator will serve as interim director for the planned $150 million Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery, UW-Madison announced Tuesday.
As interim director, Marsha Mailick Seltzer will play a key role in developing the concept for the research institutes the university hopes will be world-class. She is currently the director of UW-Madison’s Waisman Center and a scholar of developmental disabilities.
A new report from a UW-Madison think tank warns that most residents in southern Wisconsin will never earn four-year college degrees and says economic development efforts must reflect that reality.
The report from the Center on Wisconsin Strategy (COWS) released Wednesday found that in Dane County over 59 percent of the population does not have a four-year degree. That number increases to 84 percent for the other 11 counties of southwestern and south central Wisconsin included in the report.
If you think the Madison area is brimming with Ph.D.’s and multidegreed college graduates, think again.
A report released Wednesday says the majority of Dane County’s population – more than 59 percent – does not have a four-year college degree, nor does 84 percent of southwest and south-central Wisconsin.
…if you’re unhappy about the direction of Big Ten football – specifically, the proliferation of night games – there’s only one person to blame.
Blame Woody Hayes. Or Jim Delany.
NimbleGen Systems, a Madison biotech company with a new way of making gene chips, has hired a chief financial officer with some Wall Street experience and a Harvard MBA.
The move is viewed as a prelude to filing an application – possibly by the end of the year – to trade NimbleGen’s shares on the stock market. Nimblegen is a UW-Madison spinoff company.
Subscribers to Charter Digital Cable now have video on demand access to UW-Madison programming on ResearchChannel.
The free service, which began July 1, enables Charter digital customers to see UW-Madison programming that includes lectures, forums, research reports and other research programs at any time.
The Madison Police Department and the Dane County Tavern League are getting parts of their wish lists answered in the city’s response to a rise in robberies.
In a joint press conference held Thursday by Mayor Dave Cieslewicz and Police Chief Noble Wray, the recent rise in crime was blamed on too many bars, too many drunks and too few cops.
A man in New York once drew attention and job bites by walking the sidewalks wearing a sandwich board with his resume on it.
His example highlights the powers of vision and promotion — traits the Collaboration Council is harnessing to draw companies and good-paying jobs to south-central Wisconsin.
In just a few months, the council has raised more than $1 million from dozens of private businesses to help create a regional economic development corporation.
Drums will be beating and cash registers will be ringing in Madison next week.
About 35,000 people are expected to hit town for the 2006 Drum Corps International World Championships Tuesday through Saturday, according to the Greater Madison Convention & Visitors Bureau. That will result in an estimated $3.3 million in direct spending in the area.
How Madison manages Halloween is a big deal.
Drawing crowds of 75,000 or more to State Street on the final weekend of October, Halloween partying is big business packing Madison area hotels, restaurants and taverns to capacity and big fun for the most part.
But the city has never quite gotten a handle on the underside of the festivities: deadly drunkenness, violence and crowd control nightmares. As a result, the cost of policing the party has risen to over $600,000 annually.
A lot of Madisonians would be just as happy if the party was canceled. But that’s not going to happen…
While many campers this summer are tying square knots, paddling canoes or weaving friendship bracelets, a growing number are instead drawing up business plans and generating personal budgets. At entrepreneur and finance camps from coast to coast, business is open.
Three former executives of the now-defunct Bone Care International are back in the biotech business, hoping to recreate the small Middleton pharmaceutical company’s success.
Marketing professors at the UW-Madison School of Business have been racking up national honors.
As of this fall, four of the faculty members will serve on the editorial review board for the Journal of Marketing, the leading scholarly journal in the field. Only a handful of marketing programs in the country will have as many representatives on the board.
Sixteen elected leaders from Madison and Dane County are asking American Transmission Co. to consider using new technology to boost power on existing high-voltage lines instead of building controversial new lines across the southern half of the county.
….ATC has proposed three routes for a 345-kilovolt line, the north route along the Beltline, the central route through Fitchburg and Verona and the southern route through towns from Christiana to Montrose.
Vitamin D is poised to strike again for Madison.
Harry Steenbock’s groundbreaking discoveries at UW-Madison early last century laid a foundation that led to vitamin D becoming by far the biggest moneymaker for the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation.
WAUSAU – After two decades of steadily declining numbers of dairy cows in America’s Dairyland, the trend is slowly reversing itself, providing new optimism that an embattled industry in Wisconsin is on the rebound, farm experts say.
UW-Madison dairy economist Robert Cropp is quoted.
As more Wisconsin companies do business around the world, they’re also finding themselves becoming global employers. Some businesses have begun to tap into the pool of Chinese students who come to train as engineers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
A Santa Monica-based taxpayer rights group launched a formal challenge Tuesday to three patents that it contends have had a chilling effect on embryonic stem cell research.
The move came on the day the U.S. Senate approved a bill that would expand federal funding for such research, sending it to President Bush, who has promised a veto.
Two public interest advocacy groups Tuesday petitioned the federal government to revoke three University of Wisconsin patents they claim are driving scientists overseas and could hinder California’s $3 billion stem-cell research institute.
Three patents held by a Wisconsin alumni group may throw a bigger roadblock into stem cell research in the United States than federal funding restrictions, a leading stem cell scientist said Tuesday.
MADISON ââ?¬â?? One of the biggest challenges facing Wisconsinââ?¬â?¢s changing economy is turning out entrepreneurs and managers to run emerging companies.
One of Madison’s high-tech success stories continues to power ahead.
TomoTherapy Inc. today unveiled its new 66,000 square-foot operations center at 1209 Deming Way, across from the company’s headquarters in the Old Sauk Trails Office Park.
TomoTherapy is radiating into a larger part of the Far West Side.
The Madison company, which makes specialized radiation machines for treating cancer, moved its manufacturing operation Thursday into a new building at 1209 Deming Way, across the street from the company’s headquarters in the Old Sauk Trails Office Park.
Madison’s business community is fed up with the city’s “utopian” rules – some bitterly saying government is hurting, even killing them.
But despite all of the complaints, the city’s economy is crackling, among the nation’s best in some ways, Wisconsin State Journal research shows.
For generations, Madison has been a place where life is good.
Plenty of good jobs with government and UW-Madison as the solid, steady anchors. Good schools, chock-full of middle-class, college-bound students. Easy to find a nice, affordable place to live.
That was then.
This is now: State government shedding jobs. Madison businesses moving to the suburbs. Companies facing business competition from Austin, Texas, to Shanghai. More families short on cash and stuck in low-paying jobs. Growing numbers of trophy homes priced exclusively for the rich. And a feeling among business people that Madison’s city leaders are out to get them.
In 1967, Judy Haag took an entry-level state job and started living the Dane County dream of government service. Decades later, she helped the state automate and eliminate the very clerk’s job she was first hired to fill – and some 80 more just like it.
Haag’s nearly 40-year career shows both the opportunity that government jobs can offer and the way that those jobs – the core of this region’s economy – are no longer the force they once were.
The usual UW bashers in the state Legislature certainly provide some good copy for this newspaper and others.
The story line typically goes like this: Outraged lawmaker castigates state university again for (fill in the blank – insufficient patriotism, wasteful spending, mismanagement or wildly unconventional thought).
The raging lawmaker gets to grab headlines and score cheap political points. The University of Wisconsin System suffers an excessive spanking and tries to strike back.
All the while, the reputation of the entire state of Wisconsin is trashed.
The company also donates to various causes. Flesch officials were inspired by the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to create the Gordon Flesch Foundation, which gave $100,000 to New York City police officers and firefighters. The foundation, which makes donations of about $100,000 a year, also helped Hurricane Katrina victims and contributes to local charities, including Habitat for Humanity and UW- Madison.
A Michigan company that is developing a psoriasis treatment based on licensed technology developed by UW-Madison Professor Hector DeLuca announced that it won’t be going public due to the current weak stock market conditions.
Users of a popular lakeside parking lot at the University of Wisconsin-Madison will see a significant price increase come this fall.
The Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation has finalized a commercial licensing agreement with BD Biosciences to develop new research tools for embryonic stem cell researchers and life scientists.
Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation last week announced its second Kauffman Campuses Initiative with a $35 million commitment to colleges and universities throughout the country to improve entrepreneurship education. The University of Wisconsin-Madison has been invited to submit a proposal.
Researchers from industry and academia have submitted more than 220 initial proposals for $3 million in seed grants offered by John and Tashia Morgridge.
The offering drew responses from 10 University of Wisconsin-Madison schools and colleges, 44 industry partners, and 42 colleges and universities around the world. Successful applicants will be invited to submit full proposals, which will be due by Oct. 1, and the seed grants will be awarded in December.
Even before they get their names on the ballot, legislative candidates – even those who don’t have a prayer of getting elected – are being thrust into the heated debate on one of the most emotionally charged issues: Embryonic stem cell research.
A trio of business groups is so eager to stay at the front of the issue that it’s firing off letters to every statehouse candidate urging support for the controversial research.
“At a time when Wisconsin is seeking to succeed in the new, knowledge-based economy, it is irresponsible for us to turn our backs on this life-saving research,” wrote Mark Bugher, director of the University Research Park, Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce President James Haney, and Tom Still, president of the Wisconsin Technology Council.
FITCHBURG – A land restoration and preservation alternative to a subdivision development in Fitchburg’s northeast corner is gaining momentum.
At a Tuesday meeting that drew about 70 people, the West Waubesa Preservation Coalition detailed its plan to turn the 800-acre “Northeast Neighborhood” area, bordered by U.S. 14, Larson Road and Nine Springs Creek, into an agricultural mini-community of residences, community gardens, wetlands research areas, and a charter school oriented to farming and food.
…the plan includes an indoor-outdoor farmer’s market near Highway MM, where UW-Madison marketing students would get practice coordinating sales.
(Professor Cal DeWitt is quoted in this story.)
WARF is a nonprofit foundation affiliated with UW-Madison that manages inventions made by the university’s professors. You cannot do anything with human embryonic stem cells in the United States unless the foundation gives approval. It controls three patents. One on all primate embryonic stem cells, which includes humans, was issued in 1998. A second, specifically on human cells, was granted in 2001. And a third on human cells was issued in April.
MADISON, Wis. — Spinning out new businesses is the goal of many a university in the 21st century.
University of Wisconsin-Madison has been doing that for more than 100 years, helping start roughly 250 companies that have gross revenues today of more than $1 billion.
ââ?¬Å?Itââ?¬â?¢s our responsibility as a major research institution to push ideas into the marketplace to create companies, good jobs and wealth,ââ?¬Â said Noel Radomski, an official in the universityââ?¬â?¢s Office of Corporate Relations (
….Preserving a rural character in Wisconsin depends in part on preserving a viable and sustainable agriculture farms and forestry and the associated rural communities that service such enterprises. But maintaining our agricultural base is not at all assured.
(Brent McCown is a professor of horticulture at UW-Madison and directs a research/outreach center for farming and food systems. He was co-chair of the first Future of Farming Forum.)
MILWAUKEE (AP) – A company executive said Sunday he thinks he and his partners got passed over for a state contract to develop new student housing at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee because they didn’t have political connections to Gov. Jim Doyle.
Ken Nelson, president of a company that is a partner in two companies that tried for the contract awarded in 2004, said they filed a civil lawsuit a year ago against the state Department of Administration seeking damages, which he estimated at $5 million.
Responding to concerns from University of Wisconsin campuses and local businesses, the Department of Administration is changing course to allow state employees to make their own decisions about where to buy hardware items below $100.
The decision means employees at UW campuses and state agencies can buy many essential maintenance and repair items from local businesses instead of through a statewide contract that forced them to pay more in some cases.
A state purchasing specialist criticized for poor performance was given a nearly $5,000 raise and a larger pension and was allowed to take three months of vacation in exchange for retiring last year, according to records released this week.
The Department of Administration’s resignation agreement with Mary Ann Woodke is coming to light because the deal played a key role in the defense of her boss, Georgia Thompson, at a trial earlier this month on charges Thompson steered a state contract to a donor of Gov. Jim Doyle.
Steve Brown, whose opposition helped kill plans to include a dorm in the University Square redevelopment, has become a partner in the huge mixed-use project, the developers announced.
Steve Brown Apartments will oversee the marketing and management of the more than 300 apartments in the project, which also will include 250,000 square feet of university and student services space, 140,000 square feet of retail space and 420 underground and ramp parking stalls.
Steve Brown Apartment now is a partner in the project with the UW-Madison and Executive Management.
….Must-Carry Station? Must See TV?
We’ll see, because there is some question about whether or not people locally will be able to watch the Big Ten Channel — unless you’re a subscriber to DirecTV’s “Total Choice” package, which numbers roughly 15.4 million homes nationally.
DirecTV is already on board; representing a good start for the Big Ten, which has signed a 20-year contract with Fox Cable Networks to launch the Big Ten Channel, a bold 24/7 proposition and enterprise.
….For years, farmers have implicated poor power quality (dirty electricity) as a source of their problems, some of it carried by utility lines and some generated on-site. The supposed experts at the university and the Public Service Commission have refused to study it (preferring to study “stray voltage”), even though industry spends billions every year correcting the problem in industrial settings lest it damage equipment.
Levels of dirty electricity are often very high in urban environments. The utilities, government agencies and the university have adamantly refused to assess how these phenomena affect human health.
In her first three years as women’s basketball coach at UW-Madison, Lisa Stone’s teams were on national television three times.
That number should go up substantially in future years, following the announcement Wednesday of the creation of the Big Ten Conference’s own national television network, which will greatly increase the exposure for sports and athletes outside the mainstream of football and men’s basketball.
Former Administration Secretary Marc Marotta said today that he played no role in determining who would get a lucrative travel contract that ultimately went to one of Gov. Jim Doyle’s major campaign donors.
Speaking before the Legislature’s Joint Finance Committee, Marotta acknowledged that he did recommend that travel services be included as a possible target for cost savings as part of a broader effort to balance the state’s budget when he and Doyle took office in 2003.
MILWAUKEE (AP) – Stephen Hurley, the defense lawyer for Georgia Thompson, has filed a motion seeking an outright acquittal or new trial for the former state employee, arguing her fraud conviction was tainted by many legal errors during the trial.
Talk to any economic development expert and they’ll tell you taxes are rarely the deciding factor in whether to start or move a business.
Business owners usually look for other things, such as a skilled workforce, a solid transportation system or a good quality of life. Generally speaking, low taxes are just icing on the cake after other issues are taken into account.
….Warning to Wisconsin: don’t put all your economic development eggs in the stem cell basket.
Dear Editor: In his June 13 guest column, Ron Kalil makes compelling arguments against the plans of developer Darren Kittleson to build new houses in the UW Arboretum. Developers, however, routinely hire attorneys specially trained to circumvent restrictions placed on land use by state statutes and county ordinances.
If there is a way to replace God’s good earth with steel, concrete and asphalt, developers will find it. Their only goal is to turn a profit.
The Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation and licensee Natural ASA have filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Arkopharma, a French maker of nutritional supplements, and its U.S. subsidiary, Health from the Sun.
The lawsuit alleges infringement upon patents related to the uses of conjugated linoleic acid, or CLA, for purposes of creating “a sculpted, athletic looking body.”
Virent Energy Systems of Madison has raised $7.5 million in venture capital for continued development and commercialization of its system for turning biomass into hydrogen and gas that can be used to power engines and create electricity.
….Virent, a UW-Madison spin-off, has a pilot project going with Madison Gas and Electric Co. in which one of its fuel cell systems is turning soybean and corn byproducts into a mixture of hydrogen and components of natural gas that burns very cleanly with few emissions.
SAN JOSE, Calif. – John P. Morgridge, a University of Wisconsin-Madison graduate who has given tens of millions of dollars to the UW, will retire on Nov. 15 as chairman of tech giant Cisco Systems Inc.
A fledgling biotech company based on UW-Madison research is the grand prize winner of the 2006 Wisconsin Governor’s Business Plan Contest.
MatriLab, which is developing a new method to reduce infection and improve healing in the treatment of wounds, will collect prizes of at least $50,000 for winning the contest, which drew about 200 entries.
MILWAUKEE – University of Wisconsin regents are upset that a contractor and the state failed to meet their goal for minority business participation in the Camp Randall Stadium renovation.
The state’s goal was for the contractor, Cullen-Smith LLC, to subcontract 10 percent of the subcontracting to firms owned by people of color.
But it only reached 5.1 percent on the original project, according to information supplied by the state Department of Administration. The project had four cost overruns.
