MINNEAPOLIS—JLL recently issued its 2014 Global Life Sciences Cluster Report and for the US, among the top 10 rated cities was Minneapolis, the only city from the Midwest to score so high. A total of 43,991 people in the metro area work in the life sciences industry, JLL found, or about 3.1% of the total workforce.
“We're a smaller Tier 2 market,” Brian K. Ginkel, managing director at JLL in Minneapolis, tells GlobeSt.com, “but we also have 19 Fortune 500 companies such as 3M.” And other big medically-oriented firms that call the metro area home include St. Jude Medical, and Medtronic Inc. As a result, “the region gets a lot of talented workers attracted to these types of firms,” and others in life sciences, especially medical device manufacturers, now consider the Twin Cities one of the best areas to find the highly-skilled employees they need.
Furthermore, the metro region has a strong collection of venture capital firms that provide a great deal of funding to start-ups in the medical field. Minnesota start-ups in the life sciences raised $339 million in 2013 from a variety of sources including venture capital, angel investments, public investments and corporate investments, according to the JLL report.
Another key driver is the presence of the University of Minnesota, a research institution that does a lot of work in medical technology. “It's a major talent aggregator,” Ginkel says. It gets a great deal of funding from area companies, and in turn provides them with many of their most valuable staff members.
JLL recently helped Olympus Surgical Technologies America find a new North American headquarters in the metro area. The company had facilities scattered across the US and Mexico, but has decided to consolidate here. “We did a long study for them that was a strategic consolidation plan,” Ginkel says, and the big decision was whether to concentrate in Boston, the top US city for life sciences according to the JLL report, and where OSTA had a presence, or in Minnesota. But the fact that OSTA had a major manufacturing facility in the state helped tip the balance.
“They had a very strong team in place that ran the manufacturing facility here,” says Ginkel, so the company decided it would be best to build their new headquarters around them. Ryan Cos. developed the new 180,000-square-foot facility along the Hwy. 610 corridor in suburban Brooklyn Park. JLL structured the deal for OSTA, and the company began moving in a few weeks ago.
Ginkel was not surprised when Minneapolis was listed as a top ten city when the report was first issued in 2012. “We knew we had a very strong base of large companies, but it was probably a surprise to others.”
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Brian J. Rogal
Brian J. Rogal is a Chicago-based freelance writer with years of experience as an investigative reporter and editor, most notably at The Chicago Reporter, where he concentrated on housing issues. He also has written extensively on alternative energy and the payments card industry for national trade publications.
