Wisconsin universities and businesses combine to spend billions on research and development every year. Publicly available data from the Securities and Exchange Commission and the National Science Foundation provide a sense of which entities spend the most on R&D.
On the higher education side, the University of Wisconsin-Madison leads the way with $1.73 billion in R&D expenditures in fiscal 2023, the most recent data. That total ranks sixth in the country. UW-Madison was as high as third in the nation as recently as 2012 and dropped to eighth from 2018 to 2022. The Medical College of Wisconsin ranks 91st in the nation and has been trending upward in recent years while UW-Milwaukee ranks 211th and has trended down after reaching 165th a decade ago. Marquette University ranks 230th and MSOE is 502nd. Across all universities, Wisconsin ranks 14th nationally.
On the business side, Rockwell Automation leads the region with $477.3 million in R&D spending. Generac has had one of the larger jumps in R&D spending, going from around $160 million in 2022 to nearly $220 million in 2024. Among publicly traded companies in southeastern Wisconsin with available data, four firms spend 4% to 5% of their net sales on R&D, six firms spend 2% to 3% and eight firms spend less than 2%. LiveWire Group, the electric motorcycle maker spun off from Harley-Davidson, is an outlier in spending 158% of sales as it continues to invest in new products but has yet to gain traction in the market.
