A report out this week offers a snapshot of an increasingly important sector of the Wisconsin economy.
The report quantifies the economic output of the state’s bioscience sector, and how it relates to other Wisconsin industries.
The report was commissioned by BioForward, the trade association for the bioscience industry. It was released Wednesday, at the group’s Bioscience Summit in Madison.
At a glance, in 2013 Wisconsin's bioscience industry's direct, indirect and induced labor income has grossed over $6.5 billion dollars. That revenue was generated by over 105,000 part-time and full-time workers in the State’s bioscience industry, according to the 2015 Wisconsin Bioscience Economic Development Report, called Energizing Wisconsin's Economy.
"For every bioscience job, two more jobs are created in the state," says BioForward CEO Lisa Johnson.
The report also explores how Wisconsin universities have become hubs of idea generation - even as the legislative climate supporting the universities has become clouded in uncertainty. University funding saw cuts of more than $200 million in the current biennial budget. And more recently, legislation has advanced that would ban research on certain fetal tissue samples.
That concerns Johnson. "We depend on talent coming out of those research institutions," she says, "and we can't have legislation that attacks our research institutions." She says the organization officially takes no political positions, "but we are opposed to anything that is [negatively] affecting our major research institutions."
