Lubar Center for Entrepreneurship aims to complement Milwaukee startup community

The Lubar Center for Entrepreneurship at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, made possible by a recent $10 million gift from Sheldon and Marianne Lubar, aims to provide entrepreneurship education for both students and the wider community.

Among the goals of the center, which will be housed in a new 28,000-square-foot building to be constructed at the corner of Kenwood Boulevard and Maryland Avenue on the UWM campus, is to improve the success rate of small businesses in Milwaukee and shed its image as a low-ranked city for startups, Sheldon Lubar said.
“My hope is this is going to be transformative for Milwaukee and the state,” he said. “We will make people conscious of the significance of small business and teach them how to start a business and teach them how to scale up into a bigger company.”
The Lubars’ $10 million gift for the Lubar Center for Entrepreneurship follows another $10 million donation they made to the university in 2006 to endow professorships and student scholarships in the business school, which was renamed the Lubar School of Business.
The new Lubar Center for Entrepreneurship building is expected to cost about $8 million, and the remainder of the Lubars’ donation, along with another $15 million the college is raising, will support operations. The center will offer programming and courses in entrepreneurship, and is expected to be operational by early 2018.
One of the organizations already working with Milwaukee’s small businesses to promote growth is Scale Up Milwaukee, which plans to move its headquarters into the Center for Entrepreneurship, Lubar said.

The eventual goal is to spin off Scale Up Milwaukee from the Greater Milwaukee Committee, where it is currently based, and house it in the Lubar Center, said Brian Schupper, director of policy at the GMC. That’s similar to what other programs, like BizStarts Milwaukee and The Water Council, have been able to do after incubating within the GMC.
Scale Up, with which Lubar is involved both as a donor and steering council member, currently has just one employee and two contracted consultants.
“Part of the vision … is that eventually Scale Up Milwaukee will have its home over there at the center itself,” Schupper said. “The reason I’m using the word home versus anything more concrete, is I’m not sure what it’s going to look like. At a minimum, it would be shared presence and shared resources.”
But Scale Up isn’t the only organization with which the Lubar Center could collaborate, Lubar said.
“I would hope that we would partner with everyone,” he said. “I’m going to be on this advisory council and there’s no shortage of ideas flowing from all directions.”
The Lubar Center will also serve entrepreneurial students internally, in all 14 of UWM’s schools and colleges. The center will advance existing entrepreneurial initiatives in the Lubar School of Business, the College of Engineering & Applied Science, and the School of Freshwater Sciences, among others, according to university officials.
Brian Thompson, president of the UWM Research Foundation, is leading the development of the Lubar Center. Its approach is unique in that the Lubar Center plans to take a broad, interdisciplinary approach to spread entrepreneurial thinking across campus, he said.
“We think this (center) will help provide a pipeline of talent to our community,” Thompson said. “Our first priority in this center is going to be to serve our students and make them successful.”
While the new entrepreneurship center joins a growing list of startup and small business helper organizations, it will serve in a complementary role, he said.
“It might be possible to do too much of this stuff, but we’re a long way from that,” said Thompson, who referred to a recent Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation study that ranked Wisconsin dead last in the country for startup activity. “There’s a whole lot of things going on, but that’s because we need them. We’re really trying to complement the other organizations in town and figure out how we can plug into those.”
The Lubar Center probably will not serve as a business incubator, since there are already several of those spaces in the area. Entrepreneurs will likely bounce around among the resources available in the Milwaukee startup and scale up communities, he said.
The Lubar Center will serve as an addition to UWM’s existing entrepreneurship courses and programs.
“We’re building on great things that we’ve been doing for a long time, but it’s going to evolve,” Thompson said. “We understand that it’s going to have to evolve to meet the changing needs of our community and our students. I think students are asking for more support in these areas. I think (this generation realizes) that the job market looks different and having these kind of skills is important.”
Lubar said he hopes the center can eventually serve all 13 of the University of Wisconsin colleges.
He came up with the idea for the entrepreneurship hub through his experiences helping to form Scale Up; working as a commissioner of the White House Conference on Small Business in 1979-’80; and leading the acquisition and growth of smaller companies at Lubar & Co., the Milwaukee-based private investment firm he founded in the early 1960s, where he serves as chairman today.
“I suggested to the dean of the business school that a transforming thing would be to recognize the significance of entrepreneurship, not just in starting businesses, but in building businesses up,” Lubar said. “That’s where all the new employment comes from.
“It’s going to be a place where a small business person can go and talk to people that can help them. People that have been there, people that have been successful, people that have been unsuccessful. You’re not going to ring the bell every time. There are going to be defeats and there are going to be successes. But it’s a great game to be involved in, and it’s a great way to create wealth for the community.”