Mission
The mission of the Wisconsin SBDC is to:
•      champion business creation and growth through entrepreneurial education
•      develop the regional capacity to support entrepreneurs
•      consistently deliver higher levels of quantifiable economic impact than taxpayer investment required.

Vision
We help build great Wisconsin companies.

Wisconsin’s SBDC system consists of 12 service centers and four specialty centers, all located on four-year University of Wisconsin campuses. The significant educational and research resources offered through this strong university system provides the SBDCs with an array of expertise from faculty and students. Typically, centers serve over 1500 counseling clients annually, about 20 percent of which are long-term (over 5 hours of contact time), and train about 8000 existing and aspiring entrepreneurs through a wide variety of programs. Over 10 PeerSpectives peer learning groups, targeted to high impact businesses, currently exist across the state.

The specialty programs serve a statewide client base and consist of the Business AnswerLine, which answers about 5,000 calls annually, the Wisconsin Innovation Service Center (WISC), the Center for Innovation and Development (CID), and the Center for Advanced Technology and Innovation (CATI). WISC’s mission is to help clients make more profitable new product and market development decisions, performing about 250 market feasibility assessments each year. CID’s complementary purpose is prototype development. CATI focuses on technology transfer, primarily connecting “unused” technology from larger companies to entrepreneurs, to either start a new venture or expand an existing business. The Business AnswerLine also maintains the On-Line Counselor, which houses distance education tools available to the statewide network. The SBDC at Stevens Point offers a specialty service in Trade Area Mapping.  

The host institution for the Wisconsin SBDC is the University of Wisconsin-Extension, which plays a strong role in economic development across the state. UWEX’s role is to translate the research of the University of Wisconsin into practical applications for the citizens of the state, and the SBDC is an effective dissemination vehicle. The SBDC Lead Center is housed in the Division of Entrepreneurship and Economic Development, but this division’s primary activity is supporting entrepreneurship.

The Wisconsin SBDC addresses the goals of its other primary stakeholder, the SBA, through its growing focus on high impact businesses, innovation, and long-term counseling. According to the most recent Program Announcement, outside of one-to-one counseling, supporting technology transfer and company R&D is a target function for SBDCs.  The SBDC’s partnership with the University of Wisconsin and the roles of its specialty programs support this goal.

America’s Small Business Development Center Network is a partnership uniting private enterprise, government, higher education and local nonprofit economic development organizations.  It is the Small Business Administration’s largest partnership program, providing management and technical assistance to help Americans start, run and grow their own businesses.  With about 1,000 centers across the nation, the SBDC network assists approximately 725,000 small businesses every year in face-to-face counseling and training, in addition to assisting hundreds of thousands more small businesses through fax-on-demand and e-mail.