After First Anniversary, WCEPS Looks to the Future
March 4, 2013
When Matt Messinger became the Wisconsin Center for Educational Products and Services’ first executive director in 2011, he knew the nascent organization had the potential to pay great dividends back to the University of Wisconsin.
Only one year later, WCEPS exceeded $1 million in annual sales, showing a positive balance two years sooner than expected and putting the organization on track to begin donating its revenues back to the university.
“We’re very excited about our results so far,” Messinger said. “We’re hoping to continue the path of growth that we’re on so that we can really deliver on our promises to give back to the university.”
WCEPS, with headquarters in the University Research Park at 510 Charmany Drive in Madison, Wis., was created to license and market copyrighted products and intellectual property created by University of Wisconsin-Madison faculty and staff, much in the way the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF) handles the UW’s patented material.
The initial idea for WCEPS came from Tim Boals, co-founder and executive director of the World-Class Instructional Design and Assessment (WIDA) project, which was founded inside Wisconsin’s Department of Public Instruction in 2002. WIDA, which specializes in creating language proficiency standards for English language learners, has seen steady growth since its inception as more and more states have sought a common system of language standards for their ELLs.
As WIDA expanded, Boals investigated options to move it out of the DPI. One option he considered was to turn WIDA into a nonprofit, though eventually he decided to join the Wisconsin Center for Education Research, a research institution based inside the University of Wisconsin’s School of Education. Soon after arriving at WCER, Boals sought a solution to an escalating dilemma: What to do with the dozens of educational products, including teaching materials, reading and writing tests for all grade levels, and professional development tools for teachers, that WIDA annually produced to supplement its standards? Both Boals and WCER executive director Adam Gamoran agreed the research center was not the appropriate venue to house a marketplace for those products.
“It’s a main tenet of the Wisconsin Idea to go perform outreach into communities across the state and the country, and WIDA does precisely that,” Boals said. “Adam and I agreed that our focus should be research and outreach, not buying and selling our products.”
Still, Boals and Gamoran understood the importance of distributing WIDA’s products to educators who needed them, and the potential to generate funds to benefit the university. In discussions that also involved School of Education Dean Julie Underwood, WCER Business Director Jeanne Schneider, and WCER Senior Administrative Program Specialist Bonnie Griffin, Boals introduced the idea of creating an organization similar to WARF – an independent, nonprofit organization that would return its revenues to the university.
“I had investigated nonprofits when I was trying to find a home for WIDA. My investigation led me to believe that we would benefit from having a nonprofit partner organization” to sell the products that WIDA produced, Boals said.
Gamoran supported the idea from the beginning.
“There was an opportunity being lost in the area of non-patentable creative products generated university-wide,” Gamoran said. “We realized, not only for WIDA’s sake but for the whole university’s, we needed a partner organization similar to WARF to protect the copyrighted material we create and to help bring it to the marketplace.”
Though the need for WCEPS became more obvious as WIDA grew, the idea still needed backing from a key figure inside the university’s decision-making structure. That support came from School of Education Dean Julie Underwood, Gamoran said.
"Dean Underwood was a champion for WCEPS from the beginning. She was instrumental in convincing the university leadership that establishing a nonprofit to protect and market our intellectual property would be an asset to UW-Madison – and she was right,” he said.
WCEPS became reality in 2011, when the UW Foundation provided $250,000 in seed money and its newly formed board of directors agreed to hire Messinger as executive director. Messinger, a Wisconsin native and an alumnus of the UW-Madison School of Business and School of Education, as well as Stanford University, brought with him years of experience in the educational software industry and nonprofit management.
“When I applied for the job, it was very encouraging to see so much institutional commitment to create this innovative organization,” Messinger said. “I was especially attracted to the fact that WCEPS is nonprofit and that its mission is to help the UW by returning all excess revenue to the university.”
WCEPS initially focused on selling market-ready products created by educational research projects such as WIDA, achieving sales figures that surprised Boals and Gamoran.
“WCEPS was expected to take three years to show a positive balance and it has done so in its first year, which I attribute to a combination of innovative products and solid leadership,” Gamoran said. “Matt has got good vision, judgment, and he has a lot of energy. He came to us with extensive experience leading start-up organizations and that experience has really paid off.”
Messinger attributed much of his success to the marketability of WIDA’s educational products, and to WIDA’s sterling reputation for always placing the advancement of student learning as its first priority.
“It helps that we approach the marketplace with rigorous research, but the real key to our success thus far is the WIDA name,” Messinger said. “Our job is made so much easier by the fact that WIDA produces really innovative products and services.”
Expanding his catalog to include a wider variety of products, Messinger recently initiated discussions to begin pilot sales projects with the Value-Added Research Center, another WCER program, and with UW’s School of Nursing. In the future, WCEPS will work with any UW-affiliated entity that serves K-12 students, Messinger said.
“We’re never going to be a publicly traded company, but that doesn’t mean we don’t want to continue to grow sales and expand our partnerships,” he said.
Boals, who granted the licensing rights to WCEPS for many of WIDA’s products, and therefore entrusted Messinger with maintaining WIDA’s reputation, said his faith in Messinger and WCEPS has been rewarded.
“Matt has worked out great. He’s provided steady leadership that the organization really needed. I honestly thought it would take more time to get it off the ground,” Boals said. “Education is not historically good at this type of thing at all. It’s not something educators or education researchers have a lot of practice doing. So I’ve been thrilled with the outcome.”
For Boals, even with the success WCEPS has had in getting off the ground, its most exciting times lie ahead.
“My favorite part is that, in time, Matt will collect a large enough pot of money where he’ll be able to begin paying dividends to the School of Education. Maybe somewhere down the road, WCEPS will be able to endow a professorship or start a scholarship fund for education students,” Boals said. “That would really be the best possible outcome.”
