New Haven Independent

At its annual awards luncheon, the Greater New Haven Chamber of Commerce presented the global medical products company with its “technology innovation” honor. More than 500 people jammed the Omni ballroom, filling 58 round tables with eight to ten seats each.

A separate award Covidien won recently signals how it came to the Chamber’s attention — and where New Haven’s future jobs will probably come from. Covidien snagged the number-one spot in an annual innovation ranking of 122 medical device companies. (Read about that here.) It’s been inventing and making new products to help doctors, for instance, do less invasive surgery. Example: “Duet,” a film coating for medical staples, introduced in April, that helps seal wounds, enables surgeons to make smaller incisions.

Covidien has come to public attention recently because it has decided to combine and expand its marketing and R&D divisions — and move them from Norwalk and North Haven to New Haven’s Long Wharf Maritime Center. That means 400 jobs coming to New Haven, on top of 2,800 existing jobs at the company’s plant (formerly U.S. Surgical) just over the town line on Middletown Avenue.

The company had looked not just in other parts of Connecticut, but abroad, before settling on New Haven for the new central office, according to Scott D. Flora, president of the surgical device company (a division of a global health care corporation based in Boston). Flora picked up the award on behalf of Covidien at Thursday’s luncheon. He’s pictured at far right in the photo at the top of the story beside (from left) Chamber prez Anthony Rescigno and Yale University Vice-President Bruce Alexander, who was picking up the Community Leadership Award at the event.

“We wanted to build on what’s going on in New Haven,” Flora said before the awards ceremony. He said the proximity to Yale — as well as to New York — helps the company recruit research talent.

Covidien represents the kind of company that business and government leaders believe will bring jobs back to New Haven and Connecticut: “eds and meds,” or educational and medical/ health care/ high-tech institutions.

If the jobs come back. In remarks at the Chamber luncheon, New Haven Mayor John DeStefano noted that Connecticut has ranked dead last in the country in job creation since 1990. He noted that the recession’s nascent easing is being called a “jobless recovery” for now. It could prove permanently jobless unless the business community invests in preparing people to work in those eds-and-meds jobs, he warned. He urged businesspeople to invest in his school-reform drive, which got its first corporate $100,000 check earlier that morning from the Regional Leadership Council.

Yale’s Bruce Alexander picked up the school reform theme in his remarks upon accepting the Community Leadership Award.

“Having brought our community this far, it is fair to say ‘What is next?’ as we have hardly reached the Promised Land,” Alexander stated in prepared remarks. “There is still plenty to do …

“My own candidates for ‘what is next’ include public school reform, so that this generation of our urban youth have, in this land of opportunity, choices about the future that are now often denied them, a circumstance that is surely among the greatest failings of my generation all across urban America.” (Click here to read Alexander’s full speech.)

Also at Thursday’s luncheon, the Chamber gave its Nonprofit Partnership Award to Greater New Haven Community Loan Fund; “Alumnus of the Leadership Center” Award to Lee Cruz of the Community Foundation for Greater New Haven; Leadership In Health Care Award to American Medical Response; Govern Affairs Award to new Haven Manufacturers Association; Small Business Achievement Award to Steve Kovel of Hull’s Art Supply & Framing; and Volunteer Of The Year Award to Barry Kleinberg of Pocket Wireless.