Excerpted from Milwaukee Business Journal
By David Schuyler

The Wisconsin Economic Development Corp. said Wednesday that it has approved up to $655,000 in tax credits for GOEX Corp., a plastic sheet products manufacturer that is more than doubling the size of its operations in Janesville.

GOEX, which has 130 employees, has begun construction on a 190,000-square-foot facility on the city’s north side because it has outgrown its existing 70,000-square-foot building. The project is expected to create 30 jobs.

The WEDC tax credits have been authorized over a three-year period and will be distributed annually based on the number of new, full-time positions created and the level of capital investment.

“When the time came to look for a new manufacturing site, we looked at other communities and other states,” said GOEX president Joshua Gray. “We have an exceptional workforce in Janesville and Rock County, and preferred to stay here if at all possible. WEDC and the tax credit program was one positive component to our decision to relocate here.”

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Excerpted from businessclimate.com
By Bill McMeekin

Within a short span in late summer, Madison, WI, picked up accolades in two national rankings of livability. In August, Madison turned up at the top of NerdWallet’s Best Cities for Quality of Life, in which it was praised for offering “a great work-life balance, high affordability and health insurance coverage rates, and a low unemployment.”

Just a couple weeks later, Livability.com named Madison No. 1 on its Top 100 Best Places to Live. As Livability.com editor Matt Carmichael notes, Madison has some built-in attributes that contribute both to its diverse economy and its high quality of life:

“The city is home to the University of Wisconsin and is also the state capital. Those facts alone help it immensely. Major institutions like that can lead to greater stability for its population and economy, and often help a small to mid-sized city outperform some of its larger counterparts. They bring in talent, research investment, jobs and a fresh influx of new residents.”

Large Universities: Talent Magnets and Entrepreneur Makers
Large universities do more than just turn out graduates to stoke the worker pipeline for employers. They are also magnets for drawing talent and breeder reactors for creating new businesses.

In the Madison Region, the University of Wisconsin’s main campus is populated at any given time by more than 48,000 students from 130 countries, helping to create a diverse and cosmopolitan community that has won recognition as a top foodie city and a top music destination and supports a host of livability initiatives including public transit and a network of bikeways and greenways.

UW was ranked No. 5 by the Center for Measuring University Performance for total research funding and No. 10 for government sponsored research. Those enormous research capabilities have launched dozens of startup companies in everything from information technology to biotech. Among them: Shine Medical Technologies, founded by a UW professor who developed a proprietary manufacturing process to produce medical isotopes without the use of a nuclear reactor. The company is building an $85 million facility and will eventually employ 150 workers.

The Madison region is filled with stories of successful entrepreneurs who came to Madison to attend UW and decided to stay and build their companies, in part because of its desirable livability attributes. Epic, founded in 1979 by Judith Falkner, who earned her master’s degree in computer science at UW, is a colossus in the electronic medical records industry. Epic, in turn, has been a breeding ground for entrepreneurs who worked at the company and then went on to launch their own businesses.

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Madison-area businesses interested in learning more about exporting in Western Europe are invited to a free presentation hosted by the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation (WEDC) and the Madison Region Economic Partnership (MadREP) from 8 to 10 a.m. on Wednesday, Sept. 24.

The program will feature Peter E. Sanders, WEDC’s trade representative for Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg, who will discuss the market opportunities and business trends in the region. WEDC staff also will be on hand to provide more information on exporting and to answer questions.

With its geographic location, the Netherlands is the ideal point of entry for companies seeking to export in the region, while Germany is booming economically and is the engine of European Union’s economy.  

In 2013, Wisconsin exports to Germany topped $700 million, making the country the state’s fifth largest export destination. Wisconsin exports to Germany have jumped 7 percent in the first six months of 2014. The top state exports to the Germany are industrial machinery, medical and scientific equipment, and chemical products.

Belgium ranked 14th in Wisconsin export destinations with $384 million and the Netherlands was 15th with $379 million in 2013.  Both countries are major logistics hubs with important warehousing and distribution centers that move Wisconsin-made goods to other parts of Europe as well as have strong domestic demand for products. Luxembourg, a country of just 543,000, bought over $18 million worth of Wisconsin products in 2013.

The program will be held at the MadREP office, 615 E. Washington Ave. in Madison. The event is free, but advance registration is recommended. Those interested in attending should email Anne Wilder at awilder@madisonregion.org  with their name, title, company, and phone number.  For more information, contact Stanley Pfrang (608) 210–6777 or stanley.pfrang@wedc.org.

Excerpted from Xconomy Wisconsin
by Jeff Engel

Epic Systems’ massive, rapidly expanding campus tucked away in the Madison, WI, suburb of Verona is well known among locals and those who follow the electronic health records software industry. It’s probably less familiar to many tech executives in Silicon Valley, even though Epic designed it partly to beat them in the war for young talent.

Epic’s whimsical corporate headquarters—stretched over almost 1,000 acres of former farmland that now has an estimated real estate value of more than $700 million—is on par with famed California home bases for companies like Google or Apple. Epic boasts 12 office buildings (with five more on the way), an 11,400-seat auditorium, and thousands of individual offices, according to the Capital Times.

The company, led by quirky media-shy founder Judy Faulkner, also likes to have fun with the themes for its spaces, such as a hallway designed to look like the inside of a subway car, a tunnel with décor straight out of the Indiana Jones flicks, and a planned group of buildings modeled after Harry Potter’s Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.

There’s a reason Epic went all-out on its campus, Faulkner said this week during the company’s annual users group meeting that reportedly drew more than 10,000 people.

“We are competing for talent with Apple, Microsoft, and Facebook,” Faulkner said. “We need to give these people a reason to come to Wisconsin.”

Attracting and retaining young talent will be crucial if Madison, and the state as a whole, intend to transform into a technology hotbed. Many graduates of the state’s universities, particularly the University of Wisconsin-Madison, have opportunities to work out West for top software companies. Epic aims to provide a reason for them to stay.

Despite Wisconsin’s brutal winters, Epic doesn’t appear to be having any trouble recruiting people to Verona. Over the past three years, the company has nearly doubled its staff to 8,100 employees, the Capital Times reported. That growth has plenty of residual effects on the local economy, from construction workers required to build new apartment complexes in downtown Madison and the surrounding area, to an emerging healthtech startup scene.

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Excerpted from Livability.com
By Matt Carmichael

Most cities would be ecstatic to be listed amongst our Top 100 Best Places to Live. Last year, when we named Madison, Wis. number five, Mayor Paul Soglin wasn’t satisfied. He convened a task force and asked each department head to come up with specific recommendations for how to do better, not just for the sake of the ranking but to continue his quest to build Madison into a more livable place. In an interview last year, he told Livability that he wouldn’t rest until Madison was number one.

This year, he can rest easy. Madison sits atop our 2015 ranking of the Top 100 Best Places to Live.

The city is home to the University of Wisconsin and is also the state capital. Those facts alone help it immensely. Major institutions like that can lead to greater stability for its population and economy, and often help a small to mid-sized city outperform some of its larger counterparts. They bring in talent, research investment, jobs and a fresh influx of new residents. That helps technology incubators like Madison’s Sector 67 to flourish and adds a dash of culture like you find at the annual Art Fair on the Square.

Madison’s State Street district is a draw for tourists and locals, but Mayor Soglin says the locals have to come first.

“If you can create a great space where our residents want to be, visitors will want to try it out as well,” he says. “We’ve created that sense of place downtown, and we’re now expanding it out into residential neighborhoods.”

Madison is a perennial favorite on our Top 10 lists. Among other accolades, it’s been listed as a top college town, foodie city and a top music destination. For our overall Best Places to Live, it scores well pretty much across the board.

In conversations with Mayor Soglin, one thing that is clearly important to him, and aligns with the core values Livability measures in cities, is the idea that the city should work for everyone. Access and affordability are important to Livability and in Madison. A burst of downtown housing construction, including affordable units, has helped ease the tight vacancy rate and increased good construction jobs. Madison schools are good and getting better.

Other cities should take note – Madison shows no sign of wanting to pass on its crown in next year’s ranking. While Mayor Soglin could rest now that his city is number one, he just sees it as time to get back to work. “We have to make sure that everything we’re doing well we continue to do well. And then we have to do more.”

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