Cook Group

And could you tell our audience your role, greater role in compliance?

Yeah, so I'm the subject matter expert at Cook Group, which is a global group of businesses spanning medical devices, life sciences, as well as services.

And I manage the anti-bribery, anti-corruption policy, training, and then handle all investigations.

Well, I'm sorry I forgot the most important thing that everyone needs to know.

I think now you're going to have kind of events and things that will kind of bring people together in a way they wouldn't or may not always do on their own.

Yeah, you mentioned that Cook Medical Group in Warsaw with Orthopedics, Orthopedics Capital of the World up there.

The ecosystem here is very robust, and these are all players that are top of their game and ranked either number one or top few or top five in the nation or around the globe, right? And it's all within a...

What, hop, skip, and jump? You're talking a couple hundred miles.

Today, it's about higher value manufacturing.

Companies like Cook Medical have made Bloomington a global player in medical technology.

And Simtra Biopharma Solutions, which is undergoing a major expansion.

In the shadow of the IU campus, The Mill, housed in a renovated historic factory, is a startup and entrepreneurial hub where Founders connect with mentors, investors, and talent to turn ideas into growing businesses, part of a growing entrepreneurial ecosystem here.

Those 100 employees then would receive key services from Goodwill of Central and Southern Indiana to ensure the workers and their families have the food, housing, and education they need to succeed.

Goodwill Commercial Services would run the plant, which would make medical devices for Cook, a subsidiary of Bloomington-based Cook Group.

And to ensure employees and other area residents had access to healthy food, Cook Medical also planned to develop a grocery store next door named Indy Fresh Market.

The grocery would employ another 40 or so people.

This was an audacious move for Cook Group, whose late founder, Bill Cook, was known for spearheading massive historic preservation and economic development projects in French Lick and West Baden.

And Cook's current president, Pete Yonkman, hoped that other corporations would use the same playbook for creating the manufacturing plant and grocery store as levers for neighborhood success in their communities.

With a budget of about $3.6 million, the Indy Fresh Market opened in fall 2023.

In particular, he discusses the grocery store's struggle to break even, the process for addressing crime in the neighborhood, and whether this blueprint for community investment has caught on elsewhere.

The idea is to take research out of the lab and turn it into companies and jobs.

IU's already lined up partners like Eli Lilly, Cook Medical, and Zimmer Biomet.

It's a bet on Indiana's $102 billion bioscience industry, and it's set to open in 2027.

Now, Kylie, that, uh, probiotic approval, really a first of its kind, right, in the animal industry?

Super exciting space to be in.

And then into the bigger scale leadership with 30 people with Cook Medical, where I didn't build it.

The team was there.

And so taking a team, forming that and taking it into a direction to very different dynamics.

How do I gain the most knowledge together with the team in order to make these systems so pragmatic that we can work in them and at the same time drive towards that goal that we all have of making efficient medical devices was at the time.

So one of the things that I remember as I started extremely strong advice I got during those times was to be part of the groups that would maybe revise the ISO standards.

So Cook Medical was really good at leaving space for that, going into work where we Together, interpret and reword and figure out how are the directives and ISO standards really helping us.

So I did that and I did actually spend quite some time on it also with certain members of my team.