….It makes good sense that the state should encourage new businesses to emerge from the wellspring of research and innovation that erupts from the university. A friend of mine left the university in the late 1990s, mortgaged all his family’s worldly assets and, with seven employees, started a medical products company that now has 500 employees and assets of $1.8 billion.
But what if the state had been unwilling to invest in the university infrastructure that supported his education and research all those years prior to his start-up? What if the sagebrush rebels that impoverished university systems all across the western United States had succeeded in crippling the University of Wisconsin’s budget such that his professors had left, his program was cut prematurely, or his research had not reached the necessary level of development?