In the latest episode of the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation’s Focus Forward podcast, Secretary and CEO Missy Hughes speaks with Aaron Olver, managing director of University Research Park. They discuss the state’s technology ecosystem and how it remains successful during a pandemic.
University Research Park (URP) is a non-profit that is affiliated with UW–Madison. They work to cultivate the technology ecosystem in Madison to help the university commercialize technology and advance science, research, and education. URP is home to about 140 companies, many of them spun off from university research. URP companies collectively employ about 4,000 workers, creating over a billion dollars of economic impact annually to the state.
“One of the things that I find fascinating, that is probably the least understood aspect of economic development thinking, is that innovation scales with increasing returns,” says Olver.
Hughes and Olver discuss how the growing cluster of technology startups in Madison helps create a number of positive impacts to the region and the state, from increasing the number of patents produced to attracting more venture capital funding.
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