Good morning. Wednesday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of 80. Sunrise is 6:03 AM and sunset 7:54 PM for 13h 51m 52s of daytime. The moon is new with none of its visible disk illuminated. On this day in 1930, the first color sound cartoon, Fiddlesticks, is released by Ub Iwerks.…
187 search results for ""Innovation Center""
Aside
‘Innovation Center’ as Empty Rhetoric: “As a general term, innovation center doesn’t say anything specific to us, so we were from the start trying to understand what they meant by that” — Matt Jewell, an engineering professor at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, writing of Foxconn’s chimerical ‘innovation’ centers.
Spot-on.
Babbittry, Bad Ideas, CDA, Comedy, Corporate Welfare, Development, Foxconn, Government Spending, Local Government, Mendacity, State Capitalism, State Government, WEDC, Wisconsin
Foxconn: ‘Innovation Centers’ Gone in a Puff of Smoke
by JOHN ADAMS • • Comments
Trump insisted Foxconn in Wisconsin would be the eighth wonder of the world, and smarmy development men in places like Whitewater spoke about how much would come of the project, but in a puff of smoke that project’s ‘innovation centers’ are gone. Nick Statt reports Foxconn finally admits its empty Wisconsin ‘innovation centers’ aren’t being…
Business, Government Spending, Innovation Center/Tech Park
Innovation Center Offers a Seminar on How to Go Out of Business
by JOHN ADAMS • • Comments
Nutty, but true: the Innovation Center – the Disappointment that Keeps on Disappointing™ – is apparently offering a program entitled, “What you Will Need to Know When You are Ready (or Not) to Sell Your Business.” It’s part of – wait for it – the Center’s ‘Elements of Success‘ series. Honest to goodness, for all…
Innovation Center/Tech Park, Local Government
If someone thinks that the Innovation Center is one of a ‘few good things’…
by JOHN ADAMS • • Comments
Corporate Welfare, Federal Government, Government Spending, Innovation Center/Tech Park
No, That’s Not Why There’s an Innovation Center
by JOHN ADAMS • • Comments
Perhaps, just perhaps, Whitewater’s a laboratory for testing the theory that if one repeats a flimsy explanation long enough, it will become true. Over at the Daily Union, there’s a recent story about a university project that’s developed a smartphone app that allows users “to link organized recreational activities with social media.” One reads that…
City, Innovation Center/Tech Park
Amps, Business, and the Innovation Center
by JOHN ADAMS • • Comments
There was a story recently about a tenant at the Whitewater Innovation Center that makes a device for controlling a guitar amplifier. The story’s notable for four reasons: (1) it under-reports the actual cost of the Innovation Center and Tech Park by about half, (2) the current uses of the Innovation Center are so different…
City, Innovation Center/Tech Park
Innovation Center Executive Director Admits Building’s ‘Major Accomplishment’ Was Taking $11.5 Million in Public Money
by JOHN ADAMS • • 3 Comments
There’s no better summary of the millions wasted on Whitewater’s Innovation Center than that from the building’s own Executive Director, Robert Young: The major accomplishment was raising $11.5 million to make this community-university project possible… It’s not a perfect summary, of course: Young cleverly uses the term ‘raising,’ as though the money for the building…
Innovation Center/Tech Park
Deceptive Headline Can’t Hide Truth of Innovation Center’s Wasted Millions
by JOHN ADAMS • • Comments
Over at the Journal Sentinel, the dodgy headline on Tom Daykin’s story can’t hide the truth of Whitewater’s taxpayer-funded ‘business incubator’ – after a year, the overwhelming majority of space is either for public tenants or is still empty. Not businesses, not private concerns, but public money overwhelmingly for new digs for public employees…or used…
City, Innovation Center/Tech Park
The Innovation Center, Virtual and Real
by JOHN ADAMS •
Every exercise in puffery about the taxpayer-funded Innovation Center is an opportunity to demonstrate how wasteful the project really is. The gentlemen behind the project would do better to say nothing about it than to hype it yet again, but that they cannot do: insisting on the grandeur of that empty effort is who they…
City, Innovation Center/Tech Park, Planning
Whitewater’s Innovation Center: ‘The die is cast’
by JOHN ADAMS •
Public Meetings
Innovation Center Grand Opening
by JOHN ADAMS •
Innovation Center/Tech Park
The Innovation Center and the State of the Union
by JOHN ADAMS •
There’s a lot of talk about marketing public projects in Whitewater, but the best marketing is sound policy. So sound, really, that it’s not marketing at all. Yet, for all that talk, Whitewater’s bureaucrats stick to a simple script, repeating the same tenuous or dodgy claims. Nonetheless, occasionally one finds something new, like this odd…
Innovation Center/Tech Park
Innovation Center Update
by JOHN ADAMS •
At Whitewater’s January 18th common council meeting, City Manager Brunner offered remarks on Whitewater’s taxpayer-funded Innovation Center. Those remarks are recorded from 6:48 to 8:55 in the video embedded above. (Quick note: the best part of the session was a recognition ceremony for the national champion Warhawks, beginning around 3:30 into the video.) But as…