WAUKESHA – Sixteen major companies will take part in about 200 “speed dating” meetings with 54 emerging companies during the inaugural Wisconsin Tech Summit, to be held April 7 at the GE Healthcare Institute in Waukesha.
Produced by the Wisconsin Technology Council and partners that include the Wisconsin Economic Development Corp., the Tech Summit will provide an organized way for young companies and corporations with a national and global footprint to meet and explore likely business relationships around technology needs and innovation.
Those relationships might include research and development partnerships, direct investments, strategic partnerships as vendors or sales outlets, even merger and acquisition.
Major companies and private institutions taking part are: AT&T, American Family Insurance, Aurora Health Care, BloodCenter of Wisconsin, Direct Supply, Faith Technologies, GE Healthcare, HP Enterprise Services, IBM, Intel, Johnson Controls Inc., Kraft, Plexus, Rockwell Automation, Runzheimer International and TASC. Emerging companies taking part will be announced at a later date.
While larger, more general, events can produce such business-to-business interactions, and often do, a targeted approach allows major companies and young companies alike to be efficient in exploring ideas and possible partnerships.
A broader goal of the conference is to fuel two important sectors of the Wisconsin economy – its major firms, which are often world leaders, and its early stage sector, which is a source of innovation but often disconnected from the right markets and potential users of those ideas.
Other event features:
- Addresses by major speakers who will bring perspectives that will be helpful for major companies as well as emerging firms. David Krakauer, director of the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery, will speak over lunch. The summit will close with a presentation by MaryAnn Wright, who leads the Power Solutions’ global engineering and product development arm of Johnson Controls Inc., and UW-Milwaukee Chancellor Mike Lovell, who has been named the next president of Marquette University.
- Office Hours” meetings and presentations, which will be available to all participants during those times in which they are not scheduled for individual meetings.
- An opening panel discussion that will help set the stage by affording major companies an opportunity to talk generally about their goals, needs and emerging markets.
Sponsors are: American Family Insurance, BMO Harris Bank, GE Healthcare, WEDC, Rockwell Automation, AT&T, American Transmission Co., Baird Capital, BloodCenter of Wisconsin, the Center for Technology Commercialization, J.H. Findorff & Son, HP Enterprise Services, K&L Gates, The Milwaukee Institute, Madison Gas & Electric Co., Mortenson Construction, the UW-Madison Office of Corporate Relations, UW-Milwaukee and the Wisconsin Health and Educational Facilities Authority.
Limited sponsorship and registration opportunities remain. For more information, contact This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..
Gina Leahy
Wisconsin Technology Council
(608) 442-7557
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