Example Strategic Citizen: Milwaukee’s Jill Welytok

The local paper reports:

Once a month in southeastern Wisconsin, three groups of inventors meet with people who want to help them.
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At their core is a Milwaukee-area woman aiming to help change a culture.
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“If you have a good product that you can produce, or that someone else can produce within the appropriate margins, you have access to a worldwide network for promoting it,” Welytok said.
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Welytok is pounding on that message with what she says are more than 100 clients of the Milwaukee law firm she started in 2005, Absolute Technology Law Group LLC. She’s also hammering out her message at monthly meetings of three inventors and entrepreneurs clubs that meet in Mequon, West Bend and downtown Milwaukee.

Welytok has been facilitating the Mequon and West Bend groups for two years. She formed the Milwaukee group last month with some prodding from David Linz, southeast regional director for the Wisconsin Entrepreneurs’ Network.

Welytok jumped on it – no surprise from a woman who wrote six books, earned a master’s degree in computer science and sat for the patent bar exam while she stayed at home raising three kids.
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“Jill should be the celebration of this town. She understands innovation, entrepreneurship and how moms and pops can take their dreams and convert them into real businesses or markets – and she’s honest with people about whether it will work or not,” said Dan Steininger, co-director of the Successful Entrepreneur Investors group and an organizer for BizStarts Milwaukee, a nonprofit group that fosters innovation and entrepreneurship in southeastern Wisconsin.

Her name is Jill Welytok, a patent lawyer who grew up in Skokie, Ill., watching her dad invent the motion-sensitive fish that wiggles on a plaque.

Milwaukee is better off for having people like her.