Get insights on technology, the economy and politics through "Inside Wisconsin," a weekly column by Tom Still.
Still is president of the Wisconsin Technology Council and the Wisconsin Innovation Network. He is the former associate editor of the Wisconsin State Journal in Madison. Still serves on the board of directors for the Wisconsin Security Research Consortium and “We the People/Wisconsin,’ the UW-Extension Board of Visitors, the UW-Madison College of Engineering Industrial Advisory Board, and the WiSys Technology Foundation Advisory Board, among other civic and business groups. He moderated the Wisconsin Economic Summits (2000-2003) and "Inside Wisconsin" appears regularly in 24 publications. He is a lecturer in the UW-Madison College of Agricultural and Life Sciences. Still is the co-author of “Hands-On Environmentalism,” published by Encounter Books, New York.
March 8, 2010
Rethinking regulatory barriers tied to the landline era are part of Wisconsin’s overall effort to ensure that its telecom systems are world-class and that all regions of Wisconsin, from its major cities to its rural areas, have a chance to compete in the 21st century marketplace.
March 1, 2010
If you want to know where entrepreneurs smell opportunities, take a look at this year’s list of semi-finalists in the Wisconsin Governor’s Business Plan Contest. The 52 semi-finalists in this year’s contest, who were selected from a competitive field of 284 entries, are a microcosm of innovation trends reshaping the economy.
February 23, 2010
Steve Pintar grew up in Milwaukee and earned an engineering degree from the UW-Madison. He also led the design teams for the 2008 Ford Focus and, most recently, the 2011 Ford Fiesta, another “global” vehicle due for release this spring.
February 14, 2010
If you were surprised to learn President Obama supports building the first nuclear power plant in the United States in nearly three decades, you may not have been listening closely during his run for the White House.
“Nuclear power represents more than 70 percent of our non-carbon generated electricity,” Obama said during his 2008 campaign. “It is unlikely that we can meet our aggressive climate goals if we eliminate nuclear power as an option…”
January 29, 2010
MADISON – Since the 1960s, Wisconsin has largely stood by while other states aggressively competed for their fair share of federal grants and aid. That bottom-quartile performance among the 50 states is why Wisconsin has long been known as a “tax donor” state, meaning its taxpayers contribute far more to the feds than they get in return.
January 25, 2010
In ways large and small, technology is taking some of the disaster out of disaster relief.
January 19, 2010
Wisconsin entrepreneurs and researchers do a world-class job of coming up with ideas that will transform health care, energy, manufacturing and other industries. Finding the investors who can move those ideas forward is too often the problem.
January 11, 2010
MADISON – Suffering from a post-holiday case of cabin fever? Still stewing over how the officials overlooked back-to-back personal fouls on Aaron Rodgers in the Green Bay Packers’ playoff loss? Well, it’s time to relax with a few good books and read away your winter blues.
January 5, 2010
LA CROSSE – Logistics Health Inc. needed to cash out a major early investor. Gundersen Lutheran wanted to diversify its portfolio and open doors to new markets, preferably by investing close to home. The resulting match will strengthen the La Crosse area economy and provide an innovative example for other investment-minded health-care systems in Wisconsin. At a time when many emerging companies are scouring for investors, homegrown sources of capital are welcome news.
December 28, 2009
MADISON – Good riddance to 2009, a bruising year for the Wisconsin and national economies; welcome to 2010, which can hardly be more punishing – and which may even bring renewed vigor to the innovation economy. Here are 10 trends to watch in 2010:
December 21, 2009
MADISON – A source close to the toy industry has once again leaked a copy of Santa’s perks list for Wisconsin politicians and newsmakers. Here’s what the good boys and girls in Madison and Washington will reportedly find in their stockings this Christmas week. But they better not pout and they better not cry if an alert district attorney asks why gifts were delivered down chimneys after midnight.
December 16, 2009
MADISON – Some days, it seems the only certainty about the U.S. economy is uncertainty.
Three of the economy’s largest sectors – health care, finance and energy – are in varying degrees of flux, in part because Washington seems bent on keeping it that way. President Obama and Congress can’t seem to bring closure to the health-care reform debate, the financial industry is under pressure from the Loan Officer in Chief to make more small business loans, and the Copenhagen climate change talks have raised more doubts than confidence.
December 7, 2009
MENOMONIE – In parts of western Wisconsin, the ties to Minnesota seem almost as strong as those to the Badger state. Many people in Wisconsin’s border counties read Twin Cities newspapers, watch Twin Cities television stations, follow Twin Cities sports teams and, most likely of all, see their economic destinies as linked to Minnesota’s metropolitan powerhouse.
November 30, 2009
MADISON – To say small business owners in Wisconsin are nervous about the outcome of the debate over health-care reform is like saying a football quarterback is jittery just before a 300-pound defensive end grinds him into the turf. Both know what’s coming – and both can only hope to get back on their feet once it’s over.
November 17, 2009
MADISON – A record 500-plus people attended Wisconsin’s largest early stage investing conference this month and another 250 rubbed shoulders in the same convention hall at the Midwest’s largest forum on health care investing. What better time to shatter myths surrounding the investors who crowded both events?
November 8, 2009
Wisconsin may have kept Mercury Marine in the state at a “cost-per-job” that falls somewhere on the lower end of the national incentives scale.
October 28, 2009
MADISON – When Gov. Jim Doyle flew around the state last week to announce the expansion or relocation of 10 tech-based companies, the news raised a question that is harder to answer than one might imagine: How many technology companies and tech jobs does Wisconsin have?
October 26, 2009
LA CROSSE – Don Weber doesn’t fit the profile of a typical CEO. He grew up on a dairy farm east of La Crosse, was wounded while serving as a Marine in Vietnam and once lost his home to foreclosure when an early business venture went bankrupt.
October 7, 2009
MADISON – For reasons that would require an actuary and a congressional historian to explain, Wisconsin gets the short end of the stick when it comes to Medicare. It always has, since the dawn of Medicare in the 1960s, and perhaps always will.
October 1, 2009
MADISON – Forget Saturday’s football showdown between the Wisconsin Badgers and the Minnesota Golden Gophers. Ignore the Monday night football game between the Green Bay Packers and Brett Favre’s Minnesota Vikings. The real cross-border game these days is all about biotechnology.
September 21, 2009
MADISON – Author Michael Pollan says we shouldn’t eat anything our great-grandmothers wouldn’t recognize as food. I don’t know about your great-grandmothers, but much of what mine would have recognized as food was deep-fried in grease or boiled into mush in hopes it might still be safe to eat after sitting around all day in an unrefrigerated cupboard.
September 1, 2009
MADISON – Even the best seeds can take a while to germinate. A case in point is the proposal to open seven “emerging technology centers” on University of Wisconsin System campuses to better serve industry while engaging faculty and student research talent.
August 30, 2009
MADISON – A friend who sells new cars, and who is happy to see the “Cash for Clunkers” federal rebate program end, described the somewhat creepy procedure used to permanently disable the engines of the trade-in vehicles. After draining the oil in the aging trade-in, the dealer was required to pour in a solution of sodium silicate and run the engine at 2,000 RPMs until it wore down, seized up and turned into unsalvageable scrap metal.
August 17, 2009
Scientists working with Phoenix Nuclear Labs, a Madison-area company, believe they can generate the neutrons necessary to create an essential nuclear medicine tool without using a nuclear reactor to do so. This would solve an emerging national problem.
August 14, 2009
It’s not the stuff of a town hall shouting match, but one of the most far-reaching elements of the national debate over health care is the question of how long to protect breakthrough drugs produced by biotechnology from copycat generics.
August 5, 2009
MADISON – Lee Edwards, the chief executive officer at Virent Energy Systems in Madison and a veteran of 25 years in the energy business, is running an emerging company ranked among the hottest young biofuels firms in the country. Within the past year or so, Virent has won a Presidential Green Chemistry Challenge Award, been named a “technology pioneer” by the World Economic Forum and been touted in industry ratings of promising companies.
But as Edwards will be quick to add, the honors won’t mean all that much unless Virent’s formula for turning plant sugars into what is essentially gasoline can scale up from gallons per day to thousands and even hundreds of thousands of gallons per day
July 26, 2009
MADISON – Amid a crowded congressional schedule that includes health-care reform and the latest on the economic stimulus plan, it’s not surprising that a bill to extend the life of an effective federal research grant program might slip between Washington’s legislative cracks.
Here’s hoping the future of the Small Business Innovation Research grant program, better known by the acronym SBIR, hasn’t slipped too far. This program has turned ideas into products and thriving businesses since 1982 – at a good value to taxpayers. It deserves to be reauthorized.
July 21, 2009
ASHLAND – The image of Wisconsin’s Lake Superior region is that of a laid-back vacation getaway, a place where a woman’s motorcycle club from Manitowoc can share a lakeside bar with preppie sail boaters from Chicago and a smattering of locals. And everyone gets along.
July 21, 2009
MADISON – You probably don’t need a public-opinion survey to tell you most people today think the economy stinks. In fact, nine out of 10 technology executives who responded to the first WisBusiness.com Tech Leaders Survey rated the current economy as “only fair” or poor.
July 7, 2009
MADISON – President Obama wants a health-care reform bill on his desk before Congress takes its August break, and his deadline has prompted a sizzling summer debate over how to cut costs, raise revenues and extend coverage to more Americans. Not surprisingly, some ideas are good –and some aren’t.
July 1, 2009
For most of the last decade, Wisconsin has been told it should be more like Minnesota. In many ways, that’s true. Minnesota has more college graduates, more business start-ups, more venture capital and, not surprisingly, higher per capita income than its neighbor to the east.
Of late, however, the drum beats from across the border have sounded a different note: Minnesota can learn a thing or two from Wisconsin. (Read this blog item from the
Minneapolis Star-Tribune.)
June 22, 2009
The opponents of nuclear energy in the United States were almost giddy earlier this year when President Obama slashed the budget for a proposed waste storage site in Nevada. Surely, they thought, the inevitable demise of the Yucca Mountain project would end silly talk of splitting more atoms to produce power.
They were wrong. While Obama is no fan of the Nevada waste site, and he’s certainly not foolish enough to battle Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid in his home state, he understands the need to maintain – and even expand – America’s fleet of commercial nuclear reactors.
June 15, 2009
Wisconsin’s bid to persuade General Motors to put a new small-car manufacturing line in Janesville will be big. But how big is too big?
It’s hard to calculate the full value of putting 1,500 people back to work in Janesville, where unemployment is hovering around 13 percent. However, a back-of-the-envelope estimate suggests 1,500 workers paid at an industry average (about $52,000 per year) would worth about $78 million per year in gross pay alone. That buys a lot of houses, groceries, electricity, health care, gasoline and all the other things that make a local economy click.
But how much is a reopened and retooled GM plant worth to the taxpayers of Wisconsin?
June 1, 2009
Rich Meeusen, the energetic CEO of Badger Meter and a driving force behind Milwaukee’s efforts to become a global hub of water technology businesses, expected to be outnumbered at last week’s public hearing on a proposed lakefront site for UW-Milwaukee’s School of Freshwater Sciences.
“That’s OK,” Meeusen joked earlier in the day at a meeting of the Milwaukee 7 Water Council. “I’m accustomed to lousy odds.”
May 26, 2009
MADISON – Recessions come and go, but this economic downturn has left a mark in Wisconsin that will prove much harder to erase. Simply put, many of the jobs that have been lost won’t be coming back.
Past recessions were harsh, too, such as the prolonged economic dip that gripped the state in the early 1980s. But after the hard times passed...
May 18, 2009
ATLANTA – There are no plans to hang crepe inside the Georgia World Congress Center, but the 2009 BIO International Convention will take place here this week against the backdrop of the toughest economic times ever witnessed by this still-young industry.
May 12, 2009
A veteran of past political wars in Wisconsin insists there are only two times to truly change state and local government: The first is when there’s a mounting state budget surplus, and the second is when there’s a huge deficit.
It’s safe to conclude...
May 5, 2009
It’s a new twist on an age-old question: What came first, the chicken or the fertilized egg?
So far as flu vaccine production is concerned, the answer is definitely the egg. Millions of contaminant-free, fertilized eggs are needed each year to produce vaccines against predicted strains of influenza...
April 27, 2009
MADISON – This recession has spared no group of workers when it comes to losing jobs, with white-collar workers who seemed nearly immune to past economic downturns standing in unemployment lines with their blue-collar counterparts.
April 27, 2009
MADISON – There are no shortage of isolated spots in Wisconsin, and Washington Island is high on the seclusion list. Located about seven miles off the tip of Door County, where the waters of Green Bay meet those of Lake Michigan, the 30-square-mile island is accessible by boat, car ferry and two grassy landing strips.
April 21, 2009
JANESVILLE – Visitors at Blackhawk Technical College’s main campus south of Janesville notice one thing almost immediately as they walk its hallways: All of the classrooms are packed with students.
Much like other Wisconsin Technical College System campuses during this recession, Blackhawk is enrolling a surge of students who have lost jobs...
April 16, 2009
MADISON – Mention Hollywood and politics in the same sentence and most people envision liberal screen stars lining up on Rodeo Drive to save a whale, rescue a polar bear or hug a Democrat.
That stereotype is flipped in Wisconsin these days, where a conservative Republican state senator has emerged as a leading defender of current state tax incentives for the film-making industry and the Democratic governor has cast himself as a major skeptic of doing business with Tinseltown.
March 30, 2009
MADISON – Another race for Wisconsin Supreme Court and another round of ads, from candidates and special interests alike, that would have voters believe the April 7 general election is about being “tough on crime.”
Sure, criminal cases are among the 100 or so cases reviewed in a typical year by the state’s highest court, but that’s only on appeal...
March 22, 2009
MADISON – You know entrepreneurism is going upscale when the Wall Street Journal and The Economist are covering it.
The Wall Street Journal may have gone decades without writing about a company that wasn’t publically owned, and The Economist has long prided itself on being above the fray of mundane endeavors such as the mechanics of company formation. Yet both publications have produced some excellent journalism of late on the promises and perils of entrepreneurism.
March 22, 2009
MADISON – So, General Motors probably won’t rethink closing its aged assembly plant in Janesville and AIG executives were paid bonuses with taxpayer bailout money.
Was anyone surprised by either headline?
March 18, 2009
MADISON – If you believe what you hear on talk radio, federal budget “earmarks” are a shameful waste of public dollars, a prime reason why the budget deficit is soaring, and maybe even a cause for the imminent collapse of Western Civilization.
In hopes the court of public opinion has yet to reach a decision, here are a few myths and facts about earmarks – a term that describes specific federal spending items “marked” by individual members of Congress.
