Medtronic

Medtronic is a medical device company headquartered in Dublin, Ireland. The operational headquarters is centered in Fridley, Minnesota, USA. Medtronic is the world's largest standalone medical technology development company.

In 2015, at the time of its acquisition of Covidien, Medtronic's market cap was about $100 billion while the market cap for CRHF, Ireland’s largest indigenous business, was $18.4 billion. Medtronic operates in more than 140 countries. The company employs over 80,000 people and has more than 53,000 patents.

History

Medtronic was founded in 1949 in northeast Minneapolis by Earl Bakken and his brother-in-law Palmer Hermundslie as a medical equipment repair shop.

Through their repair business, Bakken came to know Dr. C. Walton Lillehei, a doctor in the field of heart surgery then at the University of Minnesota Medical School. The deficiencies of such pacemakers were made painfully obvious following a power outage over Halloween in 1957 which affected large sections of Minnesota and western Wisconsin. As a direct result of this blackout, a pacemaker-dependent pediatric patient of Lillehei died. The next day, Lillehei spoke with Bakken about developing some form of battery-powered pacemaker. Stemming from this need, Bakken modified a design for a transistorized metronome to create the first battery-powered external artificial pacemaker.