Interview with David Brukardt

LEH: Okay. Can you state your name and then spell out your last name?

DB: Yes. My name is David Brukardt. And the last name is B as in boy, R-U-K-A-R-D as in Douglas, T tom. Brukardt.

LEH: All right. It looks like we're good to go. So I'm just going to start with the first question, which is what brought you to the UW System?

DB: That's a great question. Actually I am in my eighth year at UW System. And it is the job that brought me back to my home state of Wisconsin. When the position was posted in 2012, I was living in the Pacific Northwest in the state of Washington, where we had been living for about a dozen years. As I was recruited to that part of the world to do work in energy and in banking. I had done some similar work in manufacturing and in large corporate world here in Wisconsin before that. And we had a desire to move back to Wisconsin. The position came up in 2012. And what attracted me to it were a couple of things. It was a chance to use my corporate experience working in business and industry, and also in a start-up earlier in my career. It was a chance to help the university build its third mission outreach, which is community service. And that whole embodiment of the Wisconsin idea, which is to help take what happens inside the university and to connect it to communities, to businesses, and to help touch the lives of everybody in the state, so to speak.

That happened in 2012 when the university formed its first new committee of the board of regents in many decades, a committee called the Research Economic Development and Innovation Committee, or the REDI Committee, for short. And this committee was formed to help take some of that third mission of the university, that community service and outreach pieces, which supports the first mission of teaching and the second mission of research, and to give it more prominence at the regents' level. And that's when this position was formed. And it was called the Office of Economic Development. And essentially, it was a startup inside the university. And they were to hire one person, which was the role that I was hired into in a very unique way in that the position is jointly 00:03:00funded by the University of Wisconsin System and the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation. A very attractive role, very unique. And something which brought me back to my home state.

LEH: Yeah, so I guess that sort of goes into that other question, which is could you expand on corporate relationships and how those are developed?

DB: I think that's part of the reason that the university put someone with my background in that role, because my role has been to work in corporations and in small startups, and to help bring that kind of sensitivity and sensibility into the university to help students and faculty who are looking to build careers. And/or in the case of faculty, perhaps partnerships, and to help their students get internships to help connect to more industry and business around the state. And that's one of the primary functions of this role to help connect what's happening inside the campus with business and industry on the outside.

And that happens in many ways. And we built collaborations with small businesses, large businesses, working with regional economic development groups and community groups to help kind of take down those invisible walls between academic pursuits and business pursuits.

LEH: So sort of maybe like connecting things that people are learning in school to sort of practical uses? In different economic settings?

DB: I think that's exactly capturing what we are trying to do. As this role came together in 2012, we spent the first several months, and I say "we" because I was meeting with people inside the university and with businesses and community leaders all over the state to understand what the university was doing well in that regard and where there were some opportunities for it to improve and to do better and to do more of it. And came back and wrote a strategic roadmap to say here are the kinds of things we think that the Office of Economic Development, which is today called the Office of Corporate Relations and Economic Engagement. We felt that this office needed to do three things. And I call them the three Cs. We needed to communicate, we needed to connect and we needed to 00:06:00provide capital.

And that first C of communication was to help build the awareness of the kinds of things that were already being done with business. That were already being done with internships and with collaborations between faculty and business. And to kind of raise up those success stories that were happening so that other people could see good work that was happening and also it could serve as a model for others. And those were the kinds of things we were talking about in these meetings of this new committee of the board of regents, the REDI Committee. The research, economic development and innovation kinds of activities. And to communicate those things.

And then in terms of that second C, to help connect those inside the university more frequently, more effectively and more seamlessly to the outside so that there were connections. Those are natural connections so that we could introduce students, make pathways be easier for them to connect with businesses or to learn about career opportunities.

And then that third C of capital, which is kind of reflective of my banking background, is to find ways to add resources and dollars and funds to those kinds of projects that could help further the work of that third mission of the university, the Wisconsin idea.

LEH: Hmm. So on that third point about providing capital, could you expand on sort of how that relates to more local communities? Areas where the former UW Colleges, well, where they still are as branch campuses but in the earlier part of 2000s, how that sort of relates to those areas and those campuses?

DB: Well I can. And actually the work that we do in providing funds and also working with other collaborators, private entities, to bring matched funding together. So we're doing what one of the old baseball greats of many years ago, Yogi Berra, would say, "Let's pair up in threes. Let's find a way to put some university dollars together with some perhaps state or federal funding dollars." That's the second pairing. And the third paring is private industry dollars.

So we would often look for ways to pull together some funds from a local organization and perhaps a few dollars from inside the university and then also from Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation. And in some cases 00:09:00from legislative kinds of funding. So we could all have some quote "skin in the game" to make something happen without one source being all of the funding, but that everybody had some piece of that. And that was happening, and is happening, on our campuses. Both the former two-year kind of campuses, as well as the four-year campuses, which now have kind of taken on, in several cases, some of those former two-year campuses. Which are now, have through the restructuring process put together with, as it turns out, seven of our four-year campuses around the state. And looking for ways to take dollars. And let me give you an example.

One of the initiatives that we put together over the last several years was to help innovators, whether they be students or faculty maybe working inside the campus, and in some cases working with outside individuals or businesses who have an idea or a concept, and helping them to take those ideas and getting them protected through patent protection. Maybe getting them licensed so that they could be produced and build businesses. And with those kinds of activities we've worked with faculty on all of our campuses to increase those kinds of activities.

And about five or six years ago, when we were starting this, we were seeing one or two kinds of innovative, patentable ideas coming out of our whole campus system of the eleven comprehensive campuses. One or two ideas per month. And today, because we've been able to kind of build that culture and to promote those who are doing it so that others are interested in it, and I think also because of the increased interest in general in entrepreneurship, we've gone from one or two of those kinds of ideas per month to more than one per week coming out of our campuses. So that we have fifty, sixty, seventy kinds of innovative, in many cases patentable, in many cases also ideas that have built businesses.

And those businesses are built with some dollars in resources from inside the university. Sometimes those resources are hard dollars. Sometimes they're soft dollars, meaning they would be faculty mentoring and research time. Coupled with funding from a local community or perhaps from a private business. And in some of our smaller campuses, those ideas maybe around some innovative way 00:12:00to make a food product. And there's been just a real growth in artisan kinds of foods that have been developed across this state. In natural foods, organic foods, in rural markets. Big ideas come out of some very diverse parts of this state. And those are the kinds of things that we look for to try to help grow. And again, sometimes those are on the two-year campuses, and sometimes on the four-year campuses.

LEH: Yeah. I think that goes really well into the question of how economic needs are dictated. Whether they're dictated like by the colleges themselves or by the region or both. And like what do you think some of these areas we're seeing, like which areas are seen as areas that need more attention?

DB: I think everybody is wanting to have economic growth and development in whatever region, city or rural area that they live, as long as it helps to improve lives. And in some cases it may create jobs and provide new opportunities for people. And notably with the campuses that were in the two-year colleges setting, before the restructuring process, those campuses reside in buildings that in many, in most cases were funded by the cities and counties, the local cities and counties. And they're very much connected to those cities and counties.

The four-year campuses' buildings were funded through the state. And so in both cases, there's a great deal of pride. Pride of ownership, pride of that brand in their either city or their county or where you see those kinds of activities happening. And as we came through the recessions of 2008 and '09 and things started to move into recovery, which is about the time that I was coming back to Wisconsin, 2012, the state economist has a wonderful map of county by county growth. And as the growth patterns were moving from negative to positive, county to county as we came out of the recession, the counties that either had a campus in them or near them were the ones that came back first. Because 00:15:00there's a lot of economic vitality that happens in and around the campus. There's research, there's teaching, there's the innovation kind of things that are going on. There's all of the businesses that surround the campuses. And that is something that is somewhat organic to place. And you could see it in Stevens Point, in Eau Claire, in La Crosse, in Green Bay, in Rice Lake, in Manitowoc, in Marinette. The places where we had two or four-year campuses were the counties that typically were springing back faster. And it's not completely because that's where the campuses are, but they certainly are a recognized piece of the economic development of the state. And in our economic impact study, which we did and finished a couple of years ago, 2018, the university system as a whole has an annual impact of 24 billion dollars on the state each year, which is a large number but has a great impact in each of the cities and counties around the state.

And I think you will find, and I have found, working with the local community, regional and economic organizations, and there are many of them around the state who are coordinated with also the work that the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation does. Those units are all very much tied to their campuses to figure out projects. For example, in a place like River Falls, where they have jointly with the local civic organizations built an incubator to help small businesses get launched. And those kind of things are happening in other parts of the state. There's one in Whitewater, for example, that's very similar. A kind of partnership with the university to help build small businesses. And now since we pretty much consolidated the two-year campuses through the restructuring processing to the four-year campuses, those kinds of activities are happening in each of the regions where those consolidations are.

An example. Green Bay, four-year campus, has, through restructuring, added the UW Marinette two-year campus, the UW Sheboygan two-year campus and the UW Manitowoc two-year campus. And they're now thinking of themselves as the Coastal University, because all four of those campuses are on the Great Lakes. And they have more, as they say, more coastal geography than any other 00:18:00university entity anywhere in the country, as far as we know.

In Eau Claire, they have taken on, the campus at Barron County and Rice Lake, and they're able to, with that new two-year campus, connect it to the Eau Claire campus, extend a lot of their programming in healthcare, and take some of those classes and make them more accessible to a rural north part of the state. The campus at Platteville has taken on the two-year campuses at Richland Center and in Baraboo, and is looking to kind of expand the work they do in agriculture, food production and in engineering to kind of build their footprint in a way that helps them, again, deliver those kinds of educational experiences to people these days who are very busy, who may not be students who just are in class during the day, but they may be, they may be older students. They may have a job, or two jobs. They may have a family or they need to go to school part time. They need to do these things in different and more compartmentalized way, closer to home. And also in some cases online. So I think all of those aspects of how, to get back to your question, how the campuses are working with their local entities and economic development and city and county kinds of stakeholders. Sometimes those ideas come from the campuses. Sometimes those ideas and thoughts and needs are generated by the cities and counties. And together, I think people are saying we can be stronger together, working to either build solutions, find ways to increase the economy and to add jobs and to provide more opportunity.

LEH: Hmm. So when restructuring was originally announced, were there any sort of reactions from the counties or these local economic development groups? Or concerns or maybe, I don't know, positive comments about the restructuring process?

DB: There are always concerns and questions whenever there are change in how organizations are structured. In my career working in the corporate world in mergers and acquisitions and divestitures, you go through those same kinds of things. What will happen to me? What will happen to my role? Will it remain? Will it increase? Will I have new opportunities? And those same kinds 00:21:00of questions were going through people's minds, both at the two-year campuses and in those little smaller cities, in many cases where they were with their city and county stakeholder partners. And also on the four-year campuses.

And how do we find a way to work together with, in some cases people we haven't necessarily spent a lot of time with, and understand what they do. So there was a whole series of meetings and informational sessions that were happening right at the time of the restructuring. And UW System leadership, campus leadership, the community leadership held many kinds of informational sessions. And what we heard from the local regents were, we like our campuses. Help make them stronger. And what can you bring to us with this consolidation that will help make things be better than they were before? Don't take anything away, but add things as you can. And I think that has kind of been the approach. We don't have a lot of additional dollars. So the additions, in many cases, have come out of how do we become more innovative? How do we do more collaboration? And I think we're finding that all across the state.

And as the conversations were around what will we be naming these things? We won't want to, if we're in Fond du Lac, at the two-year campus, where for many years it was UW Fond du Lac. Or in Menasha at Fox Cities where it was UW Fox, we don't want to lose that UW identity. And I think those two campuses are now part of University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh. And the chancellor there and the communities there talked about how we would help build that kind of greater, in their case, around Lake Winnebago, sense of from Fond du Lac through Oshkosh all the way up to the Fox Cities, how do we take that and make that an entity? So I think their naming convention if University of Wisconsin Oshkosh at Fond du Lac. Or at Fox Cities. So they've kept those local identities. And I think they are now like the other, their counterparts around the state working to extend programs and projects that in some cases weren't at those other campuses. Or, in other cases, where they're making, you don't now have to drive from Fond du Lac to Oshkosh to take some classes. They're available to you in Fond du Lac, where they never were before. So there's some more circulation of faculty. There is additional kinds of cross-fertilization of programs. And that's still 00:24:00being sorted out. It takes a while. Those things don't happen overnight. And once a program like the restructuring is announced, it takes not just months but years to do that thoughtfully. And that whole process in higher education requires oversight from the accreditation board, which has happened. And the accreditation board, which looks at all of our institutions, has given it its passing, very high passing grade. And all of that's moving along. So that it is not just a question of combining staffs. But it's also maintaining integrity in the curriculum and the classwork and all those things. So those are the kinds of things that have taken a lot of energy and dedication and focus from faculty and staff and students in all of those locations.

LEH: Yeah. Yeah. I think with the two-year colleges, too, it's interesting because there's such a distinct sense of identity there as well. Does that translate at all into economic development?

DB: I think it does, both in terms of where those campuses were in their previous structure to where they are now. The opportunities may be somewhat different. And you know, you have questions that move all away from what happens to our sports teams to how do we work through the whole process of do my credits transfer? And we've put great effort into those things, so that it is a fairly seamless process.

And I think in terms of where that goes in the future, all of the campuses now are, who have been through this restructuring process, are looking at themselves in a new way. It isn't just a question of, we're the same as we were before but we now have a different name. It's more about how do we bring new opportunities to what we do here? And now that we're tied to other campuses, how does that collaboration, how do we get back to that, as I was saying earlier, that kind of pairing up in threes, how do we do this more effectively with partners inside and outside to make those things happen? And great things can come out of that process.

I remember at REDI Committee, with the board of regents a few years ago in Eau Claire, when we brought in the faculty member who teaches 00:27:00engineering at Baron County, which is now part of Eau Claire with restructuring, she has taught engineering there for a long time. And she took, and every year had taken at that time, students to the national engineering competition for the Rube Goldberg competition which is where you have to take some task. In the case of the year they won the national prize, in fifty steps or less you had to figure out how to open an umbrella. And you could use marbles and rubber bands and wheels and wood and metal and springs to make this contraption any way you wanted to do.

And the national competition winners that year were the five students in engineering at Baron County. And you know, they are very typical of the engineering students in Wisconsin. Many of them had grown up on farms. They knew how to weld. They knew how to make something work every time and figure out how to wire something together or put it together in a genius way. And they beat teams from Stanford and MIT and all over the US because they brought ingenuity. And it wasn't a question of they had big budgets. They didn't. But they could do those things because we have such dedicated faculty on those two-year campuses. And now those faculty are working with our faculty on the four-year campuses. And having new opportunities to work together and to build opportunity, which I think is what a university does, to help people understand and approach problems and problem solving, think through things, figure out what their skills are and how they might take those talents and build a life and build a career, and to do it in a way that makes them highly productive students and workers and contributors to our state's economy.

LEH: Yeah. Absolutely. So I think you mentioned that some people ended up moving, there were some personnel movements within the Office for Economic Development. Could you sort of expand on that? How did jobs within the office, lines of communication, things like that, change because of restructuring?

DB: I can talk through that. And in fact, the office really was just me. And in 00:30:00fact, we were not looking to find ways to build a large staff, but to help bring ideas and resources to our campuses and our faculty and students who are on the campuses. So the staff that came over to the Office of Economic Development wasn't new staff. It was staff that exists around the state in the small business development centers. And they are connected in most cases to a campus. And those individuals are funded through the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation and through federal funding, for the most part. There's some state funding in it. But those people are in, situated around the state to help people determine if they have a business idea how do we build a business plan, how do we find a way to test whether or not that product or service might be workable, and then how do we help those people, if they need help, connect to a bank or to a credit union to get some financing to help grow their business?

So this network of people out there had been under the UW Colleges and Extension umbrella before restructuring. And since that whole umbrella went away and there's no longer a chancellor of UW Colleges and Extension, the people in that unit for small business development now are reporting into the Office of Economic Development. Which provides us a chance to give them more profile both at the state level, at the regent level with the REDI Committee, Research Economic Development and Innovation Committee. And also to help us find ways to help them pair with some of the other partners that we had been working with both at the state and federal levels.

So that group of employees around the state now report into our Office of Economic Development. And as the name has been modified to be the Office of Corporate Relations and Economic Engagement.

LEH: Could you sort of maybe expand on those centers and how that process of shifting the small business centers over, like how that went?

DB: I worked with those people through the years, so previous to when they were part of our organization because there are only so many of us in the 00:33:00state that do that kind of work. And that team, that unit, reports to an individual that was at Colleges and Extension. And now he and that team work out of our office. So it didn't change any of the reporting relationships. We really, you know, with the elimination of the chancellor of that Colleges and Extension group through restructuring, just basically a level of management has been taken out of the top of that structure. And the people in the field who do the work are there. And we have again worked with ways to help raise the communication and awareness of what they do, and to help them to connect better to our other partners around the state and where we can find ways to add capital to what they do. So I think it's a net, doesn't change what they do, if anything it improves their visibility and in some cases their opportunities for future funding.

LEH: Do you think that, I'm just wondering, do you think that like being associated with the whole system, you said that it raises their profile. Can you expand on that a little bit?

DB: Yes. I'm glad you brought that up. Because like the class work that is accredited, needed to be reviewed by the accrediting body for the campuses, the small business development centers, to receive its federal funding has to be accredited by the federal accrediting body that funds it, to the Small Business Administration in Washington, DC. And it so happens that that has to happen every five years. The five-year mark was this past summer, just at the time of kind of the closure of phase one of the restructuring and moving all of these entities over to various campuses. And in my case, moving the small business development center reporting structure into our office.

So we had to meet with the accrediting, visiting accreditors who come in from other states to review what we do and what we are. And one of the things they said was they know of no other small business development network in any other state that now is reporting at this level and has that visibility with their board of regents, so their governing body. And they were very impressed by that and they see that as maybe a model that could be used in other states. Because often those SBDCs, those small business development centers, they report well down in the organization and do very good work, but necessarily it 00:36:00isn't something that gets a high visibility or profile. So they did note that in their accreditation review and gave the state and our group high marks for having good sets of metrics.

You can go on the UW System website on our accountability dashboard, and you can see the kinds of work that is done by region or by district. And as we six times a year meet with the board of regents, our reports are online in our Office of Corporate Relations and Economic Engagement. So there's easy access to the kinds of work that is done and the amounts of businesses, each quarter the SBDCs in the state are talking to hundreds, and helping hundreds of businesses. And over the course of a year, they're helping them to connect with banks and other financing entities to bring in to their own little, in many cases, small and in some cases growing businesses around the state, tens of millions of dollars. So we're making that, we're raising up the awareness of the kind of work that gets done out there.

Because from my business experience and background in banking, when you're a small business, you in many cases are seat of the pants, and you're being funded by family and friends. And you can't go to a bank until you start having products and build cash flow. So we're helping to take these businesses in that kind of beginning startup phase when they need cash, to help them find ways to be funded, help them to build business plans so that they can become bankable and they can grow. And you know, that's the beauty and power of that small business development network.

LEH: Hmm. Yeah, yeah, that's something just I don't really think about is being bankable.

DB: Well and it's interesting, because everybody understands large corporations that have hundreds or maybe thousands of employees. But what people don't necessarily think about is that most of the hiring done in this state and elsewhere is done in small businesses as they're growing from two people to five to ten to fifteen to twenty. That's how businesses grow. And it could be in food, it could be in dairy, it could be in small manufacturing, it could be in other kinds of service industries. That's how we grow the economy. And the large companies in many cases may have hundreds of thousands of employees. But in some cases are trimming or laying off or sending work overseas. So the big, the bulk of, that forms a very strong base. But the growth kinds of 00:39:00trajectories area mostly happening in small and medium-sized businesses. And that's why there's such a desire in our group as we work in our priorities with entrepreneurship and innovation.

And actually one of the programs that we have funded jointly with the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation, called Idea Advance, helps small businesses test their ideas. So that as their, it's not just a question to go to a bank to have a good PowerPoint and a good business plan, but do you really, have you tested your product? Is it something that really does have a market?

And we've helped people that think they have an idea, for example, that they might want to sell to doctors. And we say, go out and interview, not two doctors or five, ten, but fifteen, twenty, thirty, and find out what they say. In the case, in the one I'm thinking of, they came back and they said, "We're glad you made us do that. Because docs told us, 'We're not the customer for your product. Nurse practitioners are. You need to work with them.'" And we helped them kind of change their whole, to pivot their thinking to where the product might actually sell so that we can help them grow their business and actually market it to people that would want to buy it. In this case, nurse practitioners, not the docs. Because the docs weren't the purchaser.

So that's the kind of things we do with programs like Idea Advance, which actually has taken an international and a national award for excellence and recognition in kinds of effectiveness to do work with entrepreneurs and people starting businesses. The ones that are building jobs in the state. And in many cases, quietly. Because when somebody hires another person, the business doubles in size. But it's not like they're building a big building. They're doing things in many cases virtually. They're selling online. So things are done differently these days than they used to be. And it's quite often businesses are shipping their products all over the world from very small operations that are in many cases in rural parts of the state. Which is an area that we really like to see economic development happen in. Because it appears sometimes it's easier to build a business in a city. But if you want to live out in nature and can do something on a computer and sell your products online, more power to you. And we'd like to help people when they want to do that.

LEH: Yeah. Yeah, that's important. So before I let you go, I was wondering if we could talk a little bit about university relations. And the role of 00:42:00university relations during this process from sort of a different side.

DB: Well, the university relations function is in a separate unit now. It's not something that's part of my group. But that's a function that I have managed twice while at the University of Wisconsin System and have done that elsewhere. And that's again that external piece of how do you take what's happening inside the university and relate it and communicate it effectively on the outside? And how do you open those doors? And I think that's what we are trying to do in the Office of Corporate Relations and Economic Engagement. Demystify the university. Help people have access to the pieces of it that they need. If you're on the outside, a university campus can be daunting. There's lots of buildings. There's lots of smart people walking around. There's never enough parking, it seems. And you don't really necessarily know where to start. And that's why in university relations and in corporate relations, in economic engagement as well, we like to have the ability for people to find things easily on the web. And if for example somebody wants to understand how to, if there's a media, how to reach the media relations people. And if you're a business, we've got a function called Career Connect to help you with a couple of pushes of a couple of clicks, you're into the list of, here are all the campuses. Here's what they offer. Here are the career services offices. Here's the people's names. Here's their phone number, here's their email. If you want them, here they are. They're all in one place.

And we've recently put together something called the Talent Generator to help small businesses who would like to hire an intern. Here are the hundred best secrets on how to hire an intern, how to promote them, how to build them for success, and how to in some cases then hire them into your organization. Workforce is such a critical piece of that.

All those things are online and they're easy to find. And that's what a university relations and the corporate relations functions do when they do it well, so that you don't have to wonder how to get through to somebody and you know, and they can get to the people that they need. And I think we also make it possible if you don't see what you need, here's somebody you can call and will help get you to the right person. And that's taking us back to where we started with this interview. My role, which is that joint liaison with the 00:45:00Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation, helped us to look at ways to connect a business to the right faculty to the right campus to the right student opportunities so that people aren't having to waste their time.

And as we're looking at where the university's priorities and resources and opportunities are, we have those same conversations with the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation to say what are the states' priorities? What are the industry sectors that you're looking to put dollars into, and how do we find ways to pair those interests?

And recently we've worked together to put funding into a project called Connected Systems at UWM, in Milwaukee, to help businesses work with our faculty on our engineering campuses around the state. But with a focus on a program at UWM called Connected Systems to look at artificial intelligence. How do we connect our machines? How will they work better over the next five, ten, fifteen, twenty years, and to be more productive? We've also put together a collaboration called the Fresh Water Collaborative, which involves all of our campuses working with industry that is looking at both in cities and also rural water around agriculture and water for growing crops and things. How do we do that more effectively than we used to? And again, finding ways to pair people with like interests in business with the right expertise in faculty.

And also that great talent pipeline, which is our campuses and our 175,000 or so students around the state, which are the future talent and workforce of this state.

LEH: Yeah. All right. So it's five o'clock at this point. So I know you said you have to go at this point. So yeah, do you have anything else you want to add, or--

DB: Let's circle right back to the beginning, which is the role of corporate relations and economic engagement is really focused on that third mission of the university, community service and outreach, that Wisconsin Idea, which supports the first mission of teaching. And that second mission of research. And how we do that in a way to help better connect this large talent machine, the university, with its stakeholders in communities and businesses and with our 00:48:00government partners. How do we do that more effectively? And I think that's what we try to do every day. And we ask ourselves what's working, and then what can be improved? How can we do it better? I think that's been our success. We have been recognized again both nationally and internationally for those kinds of partnerships. And we take that liaison with the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation somewhat for granted here. But what we've heard from people in other states and in other countries is we've not seen that before. And our feeling is having, in my case, an office on both ends of State Street, both on the campus and also in the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporations offices downtown, the chance to have those hallway conversations about how do we do this better, who should we talk to or what about this, or what other areas can we find to work together? We can start those conversations early, so we're not running down a path in one way and planning in one direction, and then having to back up a whole bunch of paces because we weren't aware of something somewhere else.

So I think it's about communication. It's about building those connections. And again, that's what brought me as a fourth generation Wisconsin native back to the state for this role. And I just feel that we have this unique opportunity to continue to build on that mission in the state of a great university system and helping to grow the economy and opportunity for all of our citizens. And that is the Wisconsin idea.

LEH: Yeah. I think that's--

End First Interview Session