Our Vision
To become the most respected and influential high-technology collaboration network in the Great Lakes Region.
Our Mission
Facilitate stronger relationships around research, tech transfer, and business/academic partnerships in order to pave the way for regional collaborations around grand challenge problems and scaling companies.
Encourage the creation of multiple high-growth, category kings in the Great Lakes Region by helping to identify and scale-up under-managed platform companies started by corporate and private equity investors.
Accelerate the development of best-in-class health-IT platforms that simultaneously reduce costs and improve quality of healthcare services in the region.
Accelerate the repatriation of high-technology product supply chains in the region.
Transform industrial equipment manufacturing businesses in the region by expanding post-sale customer service platforms to provide continuous monitoring, maintenance and repair, and recycling.
Reduce the operating costs and improve the livability of leading Great Lakes metro areas by encouraging widespread adoption of “smart” technologies, including smart cities, smart neighborhoods, smart buildings, smart transportation, and smart infrastructure.
The Opportunity
The Great Lakes Region is home to a stunning collection of globally diversified, technology rich companies, leading academic research institutions, and emerging technology ventures poised for explosive growth from innovations that leverage next-gen information technologies in healthcare, life science, industrial IoT, precision agriculture and smart infrastructure.
At 5 Lakes Institute we are committed to making the Great Lakes region into a super-industrial economy without borders ... 70 million people who think like a self-sustaining nation, not a collection of separate states.
Let’s repatriate the manufacturing supply chain in a whole new way.
Let’s build a regional high-technology transportation infrastructure
Let’s eliminate friction by sharing resources selflessly.
Let’s invest in widespread redundancy
Let’s encourage the fluidity of ideas.
Let’s inspire the next generation.
Let’s play bigger!
Our History
5 Lakes Institute was founded in 2007 to promote collaborative development of high-tech solutions to grand challenge problems in healthcare, manufacturing, and agriculture in and around metropolitan Milwaukee.
The Institute initially provided shared high-performance computing (HPC) resources to area research institutions, entrepreneurs, and companies. It offered private cloud computing services and training in the use of HPC for modeling and simulation, funded in part by $1 million of grants from the Wisconsin Economic Development Corp. When cloud computing became more commoditized, the Institute donated its HPC stack to a healthcare institution for genomic research and population studies.
In 2017 the Institute pivoted to embrace an expanded economic development agenda. This strategic pivot focused on accelerating the pace of technological innovation and entrepreneurship across the Great Lakes Region by promoting a regional high-tech infrastructure and ecosystem founded on our belief in the importance of cooperation across the region.
