Esko celebrated its renovated Esko Innovation Center in Miamisburg, OH with an open house attended by local township officials and the Esko North America leadership team.

Esko North America moved to its current site in Miamisburg in June 2010, to handle the requirements for a staff of approximately 260 in North America and 80 in Miamisburg. The facility houses the company’s software support group, customer training and demo centers, marketing and business development, human resources, and finance and administration. Esko has another office in the US in Ludlow, MA serving mostly of software development.

The new Esko Innovation Center has been expanded 16% in size to 33,580 square feet, well more than half the size of a football field. Nearly $1 million has been invested both in office refurbishments as well as investment in a complete complement of demo hardware and software solutions.

The focal point of the facility is the demo and training center, encompassing separate demo areas for both software and for hardware. In the process, three new full-time jobs have been added to support the center—one for the software demo area and two for the hardware center.

The Esko Innovation Center is a hot spot to demonstrate new ideas and solutions, experiment with new processes, and produce samples for packaging, wide format and commercial print. Added to the inventory accessible in the demo room is a complete representation of Kongsberg cutting tables, including the super-wide Kongsberg C. These tables are typically used to produce packaging prototypes as well as short production runs of displays and packaging. Also on site are This is CDI imaging devices used to create digital flexo plates, and software that is used by brand owners and printers to develop a wide range of packaging and display materials.

“Esko on a yearly basis schedules a full calendar of visits from our customers—brand owners, designers, service companies and printers, offering enhanced and updated training, meeting and state-of-the-art demonstration areas. Our facility is complete with all the software and hardware needed to replicate any workflow environment that ‘smartly’ mirrors how our customers’ businesses operate. It allows them to experiment to see how new solutions might improve their productivity and print quality,” explains Jon Giardina, President, Esko Americas. “The process of building our new demo facility took months of careful planning. We are very proud of the result, and how effectively our staff will be able to work with our customers in what we believe is an exceptional showplace for the direction of graphics communication and packaging. I personally invite everyone to visit us.”