Harry Steenbock believed the fruits of his university labor belonged to the people of Wisconsin. So, in 1925, he rejected a $1 million offer from the Quaker Oats Company for his Vitamin D discovery and, along with nine other university alumni, started the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF) to oversee his patent and to make decisions about the money his discovery would earn.

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Three quarters of a century later, the non-profit organization Steenbock founded has built up an endowment worth $1.2 billion and this year alone will pour more than $40 million worth of funds to support university research back into the UW-Madison. All that from the effort of current managing director Carl Gulbrandsen (pictured here) and his predecessors to secure patents on discoveries out of UW-Madison science and engineering laboratories, and then to sell licenses to those discoveries around the nation and the world.

As important as all that, WARF has also become the leading change agent promoting growth of an industry that many believe will transform Wisconsin and the Midwest into a biotechnology Mecca.

WARF's modern role has evolved; it now shares the income from patents and licenses with university professors, encouraging ongoing innovation in the laboratory and beyond, plus WARF has emerged as a leader in establishing start-up tech and biotech businesses. In Madison, 114 tech businesses have spun out of the university (of those, WARF holds equity in 30), accounting for almost 7,000 new jobs. In the past few years, WARF has been instrumental in other new developments, notably WiSys Technology Foundation, a sister organization that does for the larger UW System what WARF does for UW-Madison. WARF also established WiCell Research Institute in 1999, the private-sector organization that advances research on – and distributes – stem cells and stem cell technology.

The book "Innovation U: New University Roles in the Knowledge Economy" names UW-Madison among the top 12 research institutions in the US promoting technology transfer off campus. A Milwaukee Journal Sentinel headline earlier this year appropriately called WARF, "The Mother of All Inventions."