For more than four decades, America’s economists, management consultants, investors, and futurists have discussed the need to transition from a manufacturing economy, based on skills, to a “knowledge economy,” based on ideas and innovation. One specific facet of a thriving 21st century knowledge economy is the existence of an infrastructure that is adept at transferring technologies developed in research laboratories to those who will use them to create businesses and jobs in the local economy. Does southeast Wisconsin possess such an infrastructure? If not, how might we create one?