Stryker to invest $130 million in new R&D campus in Portage

LANSING — Medical device manufacturer Stryker Corp. expects to invest $130 million to build a new R&D center Southwest Michigan.

The expansion will include a 435,000-square-foot campus in Portage for the Stryker Instruments division with labs for research and new product development, a showroom, “customer experience center,” and office space for organizational support roles, according to documents submitted to the Michigan Strategic Fund.

For Stryker, the expansion serves several purposes. In particular, the project will create a “destination” in Southwest Michigan for the company’s global customer base, said Brent Lalomia, vice president of quality and facilities at Stryker.

“Because we have a global customer base, in order to get doctors and nurses in for training, we had to host that (training) in other cities such as Chicago or Dallas where they can fly in because we were unable in our facility to accommodate that much growth,” Lalomia told MiBiz today in Lansing following the Michigan Strategic Fund approval of a $1 million performance-based grant today to support the expansion.

“Now when we put a state-of-the-art facility in there, we’ll be able to host them, showcase what we do, showcase our manufacturing, our operations, sales and marketing teams and it will become a destination to do the training,” he said.

The company plans to break ground on the expansion in late spring of 2017 and have the facility up and running by the end of 2019, Lalomia said.

Stryker projects it will create 105 new jobs over three years as a result of the expansion. The company currently employs approximately 966 workers in Michigan.

Despite concerns from other life sciences companies over a lack of available talent in Southwest Michigan, Stryker remains confident that its reputation as a global enterprise will draw in the necessary workers to support the expansion, Lalomia said.

“We’re a global leader in medical technology so we’re a destination for a lot of folks who want to be in that industry and with all of our commitments with K-12, we’re seeding it early so they want to come back and be aware of us.”