Scale Up Milwaukee has changed the name of its Scalerator program to Scale Up Milwaukee Growth Accelerator and brought on University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee faculty to teach the course.
The format of the business growth training program has also been changed slightly in its fifth iteration, said Elmer Moore, executive director of Scale Up Milwaukee. The five-month program was previously offered in seven one-and-a-half day sessions, and will now be provided as five two-day sessions.
The curriculum will still focus on sales and marketing; finance and operations; and management. The course was previously taught by visiting faculty from Babson College, but with local faculty, the sessions on different topics can be woven together in a more complementary way, Moore said.
“(The UWM offering) meets and matches and exceeds the quality of curriculum we’ve provided in the past,” he said. “In so many ways, we’re going to be trying some new things and I expect that having local partners is going to allow us to iterate and adapt more quickly.”
When UWM announced it would build the Lubar Center for Entrepreneurship on its campus in 2015, Scale Up Milwaukee indicated its intention to spin off from the Greater Milwaukee Committee and move its headquarters into the new center once it is completed. That has not yet come to pass.
“I think it’s always been a shared vision for the future, but the priority has been making sure that we can build a really great integration for programming and we’ll figure out the physical parts after,” Moore said.
Scale Up Milwaukee Growth Accelerator is now accepting applications for its next cohort, which will begin in June. Applications are being accepted through May 4. Scale Up will select 15 participating companies, generally with revenues of between $1 million and $10 million, via a competitive application process.
“What matters to us is that significant ambition to grow,” Moore said.
The program has trained 57 companies in southeastern Wisconsin since it was launched in 2013 with assistance from the Wisconsin Economic Development Corp.
