Stryker to Add Jobs in Michigan

The Kalamazoo-based orthopedics company is building a new $130 million corporate campus in nearby Portage and will add more than 100 jobs.

Jamie Hartford

Stryker Corp. plans to grow its presence in its home state of Michigan with a new $130 million corporate campus that's expected to create 105 jobs over the next three years.

Set to break ground in late spring 2017 in Portage, not far from the orthopedics company's headquarters in Kalamazoo, the 485,000-sq-ft campus will include a customer experience center, showroom, lab space for R&D and other functions, as well as room for sales, marketing, and support staff for Stryker's growing medical instruments division.

The facility will be used as a destination for clinician training, Brent Lalomia, Stryker's vice president of quality and facilities, told the MiBiz website. In the past, he said, the company had to conduct such training in places like Chicago and Dallas.

The new jobs will be "high-wage, high-skill" positions, according to the website Xconomy, and the Detroit Free Press reported they will be filled by engineers and scientists.

Stryker had considered other locations in other states for the expansion but may have been swayed by incentives from the state of Michigan, according to the Detroit Free Press,. The company was awarded a $1 million grant for the project through the Michigan Business Development Program and may ask the state for more, the newspaper reported.

Stryker is only the latest medical device company to announce an expansion in December. Siemens Healthineers said earlier this month that it could double its workforce in Walpole, MA, over the next decade, and Johnson & Johnson expects to add 75 jobs in the first half of 2017 at a new health tech center in Rhode Island.

Jamie Hartford is the director of content for medtech brands in UBM's Advanced Manufacturing Group. Reach her at [email protected].

[Image courtesy of BASKETMAN/FREEDIGITALPHOTOS.NET]