Last week, Jennifer Brunner began her Innovation Tour for Ohio Jobs as part of her campaign for the U.S. Senate. Brunner’s first stop was Meridian Bioscience, Inc. in Newton, Ohio, last Wednesday.

From Brunner’s campaign blog:

After speaking to the District 4 meeting of the Communication Workers of America on Wednesday last week, I made my first stop on our campaign’s Innovation Tour for Ohio Jobs, traveling to Meridian Bioscience, Inc.

This company is the largest employer and taxpayer in Newtown, Ohio just inside the Hamilton County border almost to Clermont County. Meridian’s history is compelling. Its founder, Bill Motto, started the company in 1975 with a $500 investment working out of his garage. The company is now a $139 million dollar company publicly traded on the New York stock exchange with American and European subsidiaries in Florida, Maine and Tennessee, and in France, Italy, Belgium and the Netherlands and more than 400 employees with nearly 250 right here in Ohio in the Newton home office.

…

When we arrived at Meridian, we met with Bill Motto, now Executive Chairman of the Board; Jack Kraeutler, CEO; and Larry Baldini, VP Operations and Information Systems. Larry led us on our tour. We met Rita at the front desk, and Brenda Hughes did a great job arranging our visit. We met many other employees as we traversed the various areas of this large manufacturing and distribution plant.

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Larry asked Brian to start up one of the plant’s robotic machines that has been built by a Dayton robotic company. One of the two robotic equipment suppliers for the plant had previously custom built and supplied robotic equipment to the automotive industry; now Meridian was a customer. Management remarked that it’s unlikely they would have worked with Meridian before the downturn in the auto industry, but it was working now. For Meridian, the importance of having this service provided locally cannot be overemphasized. The machine has to be custom built to specs provided by Meridian, and as its use begins, an engineer from the robotic company works with an engineer at Meridian to further customize the machine as operation and implementation move along.

This demonstrates the inter-connected nature of Ohio’s economy. As I pointed out in the urban initiative I rolled out through my Cleveland City Club speech in August, Ohio holds great potential to move to the forefront in clean energy and bioscience jobs, and it’s already happening.

Nominations for projects for the Innovation Tour can be made here.

Cleveland-based Arteriocyte Medical Systems was the second tour stop, held on Oct. 22. The Brunner campaign plans to announce additional stops soon.

Tags: Jennifer Brunner, Meridian Bioscience

This entry was posted on Monday, October 26th, 2009 at 11:08 am and is filed under Economic Development, Government, Health Care. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.