Jim Evans
'80, Mechanical Engineering
Following a distinguished 30-year career at Stryker, Jim Evans announced his retirement in March 2016. For three decades, Jim has been the inventor behind many significant industry leading technologies for both the MedSurg and Neurotechnology and Orthopaedics Groups. Jim’s career is defined by the positive impact he has had on Stryker, the industry, and customers and patients around the world.
During his first 18 years with Stryker Instruments, Jim led the Instruments R&D team while launching a number of its flagship products that have since become the industry leaders in market share, product performance and value creation. Jim moved to New Jersey in 2002 to run R&D for the Orthopaedics business. During his eight years with Stryker Ortho, a few of his many notable contributions include leading an R&D team at Recon that introduced Triathlon, Triathlon Revision, Particle Sintered Foam (Tritanium), Restoration Modular Revision System, X3 poly, just to name a few of the block buster products.
In 2015 Jim moved back to Kalamazoo into a new corporate role and has successfully lead company-wide efforts around consistent, compliant and effective design controls.
When asked what motivated Jim to always want to stay ahead of the competition and invent the very best products his response was simple, yet powerful. He said, “I never wanted a sales rep to ever look me in the eye and say… I’d rather have the competitor’s bag of products.”