UW-Green Bay, Brown County planning ‘innovation park’ to support entrepreneurship

For years, officials with Brown County and the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay have been working toward creating a research park on campus that would spur entrepreneurship and innovation. 

Five years after opening a Science, Technology, Engineering and Math innovation center on campus, UW-Green Bay released a conceptual map for a mixed-use development, called the Phoenix Innovation Park, on 64 acres of land on campus. 

The plan calls for building new academic buildings for research and development along with a hotel, restaurant, commercial buildings and mixed-use housing.

“We’re probably one of the few universities that has too much land and too much parking,” said Alan Peters, economic development executive for UW-Green Bay. “We’re looking to turn some of the empty land into some resources for the students and community as a whole.”

Peters said the project will help give UW-Green Bay, a Division I university, the amenities that many of its peers have, like lodging for opposing sports teams and potentially retail for students who live on campus. 

He also said campus enrollment has grown by more than 17 percent since 2020, and the enhanced amenities would support continued enrollment growth.

“We’ve got over 2,100 students who currently live on campus in the dorms, but they have to hop in a car and drive about 10 to 15 minutes to get any kind of dorm essentials,” he said.

Leaders seek to foster local business development

Early discussions about a research park came in response to a number of local businesses getting bought out and relocating their headquarters, and a need to support the area’s future workforce, according to County Executive Troy Streckenbach.

“The big question,” Streckenbach said, “was: What are we doing to make sure that we’re planting the seed for the next entrepreneur to be born here?”

Officials settled on the idea of developing a research park. After consulting with the Association of University Research Parks, Streckenbach said stakeholders learned they needed an engineering school to anchor a possible research park.

Brown County and UW-Green Bay broke ground on a $15 million STEM Innovation Center in 2018, and the facility opened in 2019.

The building is owned by the county on land leased from the Universities of Wisconsin system. It houses UW-Extension offices, the county’s land and water conservation department and UW-Green Bay’s engineering school.

“If we didn’t get that, we wouldn’t be talking about the Phoenix Innovation Park,” Steckenbach said. “Without the engineering, you couldn’t have a research park and you couldn’t have a healthy ecosystem of entrepreneurship to take place at the level that we were hoping for.”

Peters agreed, saying the innovation park builds on the public-private partnership that went into building the STEM facility. That facility received $5 million in state funding, $5 million from the county and $5 million from private donors.

Peters said buildings in the innovation park would be on land leased to third-party operators who would then build and operate the facilities. He also said land lease agreements with developers would be an additional revenue stream.

Completion of project likely to take years

Peters said the Phoenix Innovation Center project doesn’t have a firm timeline, but it would likely come after the university completes its project to replace the Cofrin Library with a Cofrin Technology and Education Center. 

The university expects to begin construction on the new building in spring 2025 with completion set for 2027.

In the meantime, Peters said UW-Green Bay will work to get state and local approvals, which includes going before the Board of Regents and State Building Commission.

“We’re at the phase where we’re entering due diligence,” he said. “We’ve got this idea, this concept, that we’ve been talking to several stakeholders in the community and neighborhood groups about, and now we’re digging in and starting to get more detail to it.”