Greatbatch celebrates opening of its new Clarence headquarters
Officials say firm is helping to build ‘knowledge economy’
Hank Yun never planned on moving to the Buffalo Niagara region, but a good job brought the battery engineer here.
Olean native Chris Williams wanted to come home after working for a few years in Maryland.
Both ended up in Clarence, working at Greatbatch Inc., thanks to the medical device and battery manufacturer’s push over the last few years to consolidate its research and development in the Buffalo Niagara region.
That effort culminated Wednesday with Greatbatch formally opening its new $10 million headquarters and research center in Clarence.
But officials also said Greatbatch’s expansion here, which has brought about 60 new research and engineering jobs to the region since the beginning of 2006, is a model for economic development in the 21st century.
With the region’s manufacturing base shrinking — and with it one of the region’s major sources of goodpaying jobs — gaining a foothold in the so-called “knowledge economy” is a main focus for economic development officials across the country.
“We know we’ll never attract the next General Motors stamping plant,” said David C. Hartzell, the chairman of the Clarence Industrial Development Agency, which provided tax breaks for the new Greatbatch office. “These are really the perfect jobs for Clarence.”
That’s why the competition for skilled engineers, like Yun and Williams, can be intense. And the goodpaying, skilled jobs that companies like Greatbatch can provide are equally coveted.
“This is what the bioinformatics center is trying to do,” said John Slenker, the state Labor Department’s regional economist in Buffalo. “These are the kind of jobs that every area is fighting to get. They pay well.”
That’s important because the region has long depended on factory jobs as a main source of good-paying jobs. But the trend that started with the downsizing and eventual shutdown of the local steel plants in the 1970s and early 1980s is continuing today, with the shrinking auto industry.
Those losses are costing the region some of its better-paying jobs — one of every three factory jobs in the region has vanished over the last decade—but the service industry jobs that are replacing them don’t pay nearly as well.
“It will take two service jobs for each goods-producing job lost to keep the region’s wage income at a constant level,” said George Palumbo, a Canisius College economist, who studies the local economy with fellow Canisius economist Mark Zaporowski.
But it goes beyond that, Slenker said. “There’s also a synergy that happens whenever you get the R&D located in an area because of the spin-offs that can be created.”
That could be something as big as a new company being formed from an advancement derived from that research. It could be something less visible, such as the development of a critical mass of research-related resources, linking local companies with the region’s colleges and universities, said John Simpson, the president of the University at Buffalo.
Or bringing in one researcher could make it easier to persuade another one to take a job in the Buffalo Niagara region, over a similar one elsewhere. “When you have researchers, you’ll have people who have been recruited from around the country,” Slenker said. “It helps attract other researchers.”
Greatbatch executives said consolidating their R&D work in a single site, with the company’s 40,000-square-foot lab occupying almost a third of the Wehrle Drive headquarters and research center, is more efficient and cost-effective.
Research is a big deal at Greatbatch. The company typically plows about 8 percent of its sales back into its research and development efforts, about double the national average. That will add up to about $48 million this year, up about 17 percent from last year.
That investment is paying off in patents. The company already holds 376 U. S. patents and 266 more in other countries, but the R&D efforts have resulted in an additional 685 patents that are pending, both in the U. S. and in other nations.
“The future of this company pivots on innovation,” said Thomas J. Hook, Greatbatch’s president and chief executive officer. “Innovation is what begins and ends with everything we do, and at the hear of that is education. We are huge backers of education.”
No local company makes a bigger investment than Greatbatch in the education of its 700 local employees — and their children — by paying for all, or part, of their college educations.
The program pays all higher education costs for current employees who have been with the company for at least 10 years.
“What a great acknowledgment of the importance of education to our future,” said Erie County Executive Chris Collins. “I don’t know of any other company that would pay for the education of their employees’ children.”
But what sets Greatbatch apart is that the company has long extended that help to the children of its employees.
For workers hired before 2003 who have been at the company for less than 10 years, the company pays education costs for children at a rate equal to 10 percent for each year of employment.
The tuition reimbursement for Greatbatch workers hired in 2003 and beyond is capped at an amount equal to tuition for a local state university.
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