Medical Firms Congregating in Twin Cities

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.