The Milwaukee region is home to a concentration of water companies. They include nine different facilities for five of the world’s 11 largest water companies.
But it’s equally clear that those companies lack the collaborative research capacities to act as a global player, at least at this stage. Rather, they operate mostly in isolation, without any tradition of working with the local universities – a serious shortcoming, when one considers the contributions that the University of Wisconsin-Madison has made to biotech development and the role that Silicon Valley universities played in advancing computer science.
Milwaukee, by contrast, has failed to generate a meaningful number of patents for water innovations, although the big companies boast their own labs. The Great Lakes WATER Research Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee focuses on ecology, not water-treatment technologies.