Mike Hoge, senior vice president of global operations at Accuray, takes Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.), center, and Wisconsin Economic Development Corp. CEO Missy Hughes, right, on a tour of the business in August. Accuray, part of the Wisconsin Biohealth Technology Hub, manufactures radiation therapy equipment. (Erik Gunn | Wisconsin Examiner)

When Wisconsin was chosen for its proposal to develop a technology hub and a $49 million federal investment, the state had several advantages.

The first was that the Badger State already had an established and growing technology sector that he proposed to further develop. Another reason was that she wasn’t already the center of attention – or largesse – for her work.

For Wisconsin, the established field was biohealth and personalized medicine: developing new diagnostic and treatment technologies tailored to a patient’s distinctive genetic characteristics.

The state’s biohealth sector is a beneficiary of the federal Wisconsin Technology Hub Program, a national industrial policy aimed at growing important sectors of the U.S. economy.

“We weren’t looking to build a technology ecosystem from scratch,” Cristina Killingsworth of the U.S. Commerce Department’s Economic Development Administration said in an interview Monday. “We wanted regions across the country to identify areas where they were already excellent, and where targeted federal investments could make them world-class. »

Wisconsin fits the bill with “an incredibly robust ecosystem in biotechnology,” Killingsworth said. “We would just be accelerating this rather than building it.”

At the same time, the state was not yet in the national spotlight for its work.

The goal of the tech hub program “is really to ensure that we maintain our technological edge, with the idea that we can’t do that if we invest in the same handful of cities over and over again,” Killingsworth said. “This program aims to invest in every region of the United States because we can only be competitive if we take advantage of everything this country has to offer.”

THE technology center program is part of the CHIPS and Science Act of 2022. The sweeping bipartisan legislation, passed by Congress and signed by President Joe Biden, was signed into law to bring computer chip makers and related technology industries back to the United States from abroad .

The technology hub program was written into legislation at the encouragement of Senator Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.). It builds on a 2019 Brookings Institution paper that called for fostering “innovation hubs” across the country, based on local industrial assets.

Killingsworth, acting assistant secretary of Commerce for economic development, was in Wisconsin this week as the keynote speaker at an annual conference hosted by BioForward Wisconsina nonprofit umbrella group for the state’s biohealth industry.

Lisa Johnson, CEO of BioForward, said the annual conference was bigger this year.

“This is really about putting Wisconsin on the map and proving that we can protect and support national and economic security and make the United States more competitive in the future,” Johnson said.

Another qualifying element of the Wisconsin technology hub proposal was its benefit to the broader community.

The proposals had to demonstrate that the benefits of a tech hub would “accumulate equitably,” Killingsworth told the Wisconsin Examiner, “with particular emphasis on ensuring that underserved communities could benefit from the tech hub and have a say to say in the governance of the technological center.

The University of Wisconsin System, UW-Madison and the Medical College of Wisconsin, as well as the state’s technical college system, are all integral to the Wisconsin project, as research partners, but especially in the workforce development framework that participating industries need.

Government and economic development agencies are all key components, along with private industry, Killingsworth said, because the ultimate goal is for the tech hub to produce a marketable product or service.

“This program is also about commercialization,” she said. “This is not about an R&D (research and development) program, rather it’s about how to ensure that companies that are advancing the technologies of the future grow and stay here in the United States.”

And while private industry is essential, government also has a role to play.

The Wisconsin Technology Center is designed to benefit the community at large through the planned development of a Wisconsin health database. This will involve “getting data on populations that we may not have collected in other ways,” said Wendy Harris of the Wisconsin Biohealth Tech Hub, where she holds the title of regional innovation manager .

There is also a screening program that will focus on areas of “social and economic deprivation,” including tribal communities and residents of poor zip codes, “which could not happen without some type of federal funding,” Harris said.

“There are certain gaps, market failures, that sometimes it’s up to outside entities to step in and fill,” Killingsworth said. Government support can help small suppliers and manufacturers enter the market “who otherwise would not have access to testing or laboratory equipment”.

The result, Killingsworth said, is “more inclusive of private entities that otherwise might not even have a head start in being able to start the companies we need to grow and stay in the United States to commercialize technologies that are essential to our economy and our economy.” national security. »

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