Winner
Industrial Manufacturing
Despite being employed in a senior position at GE Healthcare Technologies, Hiroyuki Fujita left in 2005 to pursue an academic opportunity as director of imaging physics at Case Western Reserve University.
He and a professor, Robert Brown, decided to incubate Quality Electrodynamics (QED) within the university with grant support from the state of Ohio. In 2006, they launched QED — which manufactures detectors used in magnetic resonance imaging machines — with just three people on staff, and within a year and a half, the company had doubled in size and earned both ISO 13485 certification and Japan’s MHLW registration as a foreign medical device manufacturer. Fujita’s technical expertise and reputation won significant research contracts with Toshiba Medical Systems Corp. and Siemens Healthcare, and both companies became significant strategic partners with QED.
Along the way, the company has been financed with grants and partnerships awarded on the basis of the company’s quality, as Fujita took a personal financial risk and invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in development and production in anticipation of sales.
In late 2008, when the company had outgrown its original 3,300-square-foot building, Fujita moved his team into a state-of-the-art facility, anticipating that the new 27,000-square-foot area would be large enough to meet the growing needs of the company’s customers.
Over the past four years, QED’s revenue growth rate has exceeded 1,500 percent, and today, the company employs 54 people, has 16 production coils and new products planned for release this year. As a result of this success, QED was named 11th in the nation on Forbes 2009 list of America’s Most Promising Top 20 Companies in February. The celebration of the feat included senior executives from Toshiba, Siemens, Philips, UH, Cleveland Clinic, CWRU, NIH, major academic institutions, the state of Ohio, and consulates from Japan and Germany, as well as local leaders.
With the company’s success, Fujita is forging ahead with plans to diversity and to impact society in other industries.
How to reach: Quality Electrodynamics, (440) 638-5106
