I-Q Corridor

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Wisconsin lies at the core of the I-Q Corridor, a region rich in ideas, innovative workers, investment capital and some of the world’s most exciting intellectual property – especially in biotechnology, the life sciences, information technology and advanced manufacturing.

A distance of only 400 miles separates two dynamos of the Midwest economy – Chicago & the “twin cities” of Minneapolis & St. Paul. That’s a shorter drive or flight than what separates San Diego from the “Silicon Valley” in California.
Strategically located between Chicago and the Twin Cities and traversed by Interstates 90 and 94 lies Wisconsin, one of the nation’s fastest growing technology states in its own right.
Biotechnology is a $5 billion industry in Wisconsin, making up a cluster of about 200 companies employing 28,000.
Wisconsin is ranked in the top 10 for biotechnology employment growth and the number of biotech companies.
Wisconsin has leading research facilities such as the UW-Madison (perennially top five in U.S. research spending), the Medical College of Wisconsin and the Marshfield Clinic.
Wisconsin has growing capital markets, especially within angel networks; strong partnership organizations' a thriving cluster of science companies and a health climate for businesses, academic and government cooperation.
Wisconsin has emerging centers of research excellence in tissue regeneration, personalized medicine, error-free hospitals, genetically modified organisms, zoonotics disease control & small molecule pharmaceuticals. Its bioinformatics and medical devices clusters are strong and growing, led by companies such as GE Healthcare and TomoTherapy.
Information Technology and other high-tech goods and services are an emerging sector of the Wisconsin economy. In July 2007, the annual Cyberstates survey by AeA showed high-tech exports from Wisconsin totaled $4.3 billion in 2006, jumping an impressive $827 million from the previous year. Fully 25 percent o Wisconsin's exports are tech exports, and the sector supports an additional 12,300 tech-based jobs.
The I-Q Corridor is home to more than 14.3 million people who live within a short commute of I-90, I-94 or I-43 between Chicago and the Twin Cities.

That figure includes 7.7 million in Chicagoland counties that lie north and west of the city (Cook, DuPage, Kane, Lake and McHenry); 372,000 in the Rockford, Ill., area; 160,000 in Wisconsin's Kenosha County; 160,000 in Wisconsin's Rock County; 1.75 million in the Milwaukee-Racine-Waukesha area; 602,000 in Wisconsin's Madison-Baraboo area; 180,000 in Wisconsin's Eau Claire-Chippewa-Dunn area; 673,000 in the four most populated counties of the Fox Valley (Brown, Fond du Lac, Outagamie and Winnebago); 75,000 in the Marshfield-Wisconsin Rapids area; and 2.81 million in the Twin Cities region.

These figures are from 2005 and 2006 population estimates and/or U.S. Census data, and are rounded to the nearest thousand.

But it’s the combined power of the region that makes the “I-Q Corridor” a vibrant location for biotechnology research, technology transfer and company growth.