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Intermas Consultants Ltd. operates as a locus where we pool and organize the necessary desk-support, material resources and ‘corporate memory’ and as a systematic synergy platform, where the experience of its senior members meets with the freshness and new skills of the younger and entrepreneurial generation of our associates, to form a creative win-win mentoring office atmosphere. Till today, the company succeeds to maintain a lean and flexible ‘synergy platform’ structure that allows its senior people to minimize their office workload involvement and to allocate most of their time on value added activities: coaching and field-consulting operations. Regarding international consulting projects, our senior core-team members are encouraged to perform short to medium-term contract-consulting in various countries of Eastern Europe, Black Sea and Mediterranean. During the last 10 years, Intermas partners had the opportunity to acquire considerable hands-on experience on the restructuring of public industrial concerns, research institutes and recreation and culture facilities with the task to develop entrepreneurial thinking and to increase commercialization and market orientation aspect of their products/services as an imperative for their survival. We define as our core consulting business as the identification, concept definition, development and commercialization of innovation opportunities in Industry, Technology and Culture
Foreground Competences Technology Marketing and Technology Transfer Technology marketing is to a great extent the outcome of our previous experience and our several years of work in the marketing of Industrial goods and of our activities in the representation of engineering and industrial companies. Intermas and its key members have developed capacities and methodologies catering along different client, product, market types, as well as along various degrees of development in technological, industrial and economic environments. Building on our work and consulting experience in industrial engineering and marketing, step-by step-we have been led to our present focus on Technology Assessment and Technology Transfer related consulting. Thus our company has progressively developed its own analytical technology assessment methodologies and technology marketing capabilities, capable to overview, survey, assess, and register interesting/promising technologies. In view of a technology transfer potential, particular attention is given to the state of development of the technology and its potential for innovative applications as well as to its nature and its appropriateness for protection in order to build a case for Intellectual Property (IP) rights (patenting or else) wherever applicable. Innovation Assessment, Entrepreneurship and new Business Development To launch a New Business venture is a challenging undertaking and the known mortality rates for new business ideas, novel technologies, innovative products and high-tech ventures, is usually very high. The road to a market-proven success includes the early identification, appreciation and choice of fundamentally good novel ideas/technologies/products/services, their careful driving from the concept definition till the appropriate pilot product/market operation, where the fragile start-up entity should pass successfully the pilot commercialization test, prior to the unfolding of a costly full scale venture financing effort. The locus of our value-added consultancy is on the boundaries between: techno-teams and legal entities, concepts and prototypes, inventive engineering and innovative processes/products/services, academic entrepreneurs and professional managers, angel seed-funds and venture capitalists. Within the above framework we strive to provide the client organization with a range of services including:
Three major long-term Intermas assignments have decisively shaped our methodology approach: (a) the WB -financed technology assessment of 20 Georgian Research Institutes in search of their innovative potential during 2002-2004, (b) the IFC/BP -financed consulting operation involving the concept development, project initiation, implementation and start - up running of a Technology Business Incubator in Tbilisi-Georgia during 2004-2006 and (c) the privately financed implementation of a Commercialization Strategy for reorientation to the market economy of the ex-soviet ‘LTP Laser Research Institute’, Yerevan-Armenia, during the period 2000-2004. Strong with the experience of these three ‘hands-on’ operations Intermas Consultants have built the necessary and complementary ‘know-how’ and skills specific to the establishment and operation of the appropriate Institutional Support, which we use to call ‘Facilitating Institutional Infrastructure’, necessary to support High-tech innovation and Entrepreneurship.
Today, our company also scores a number of individual success cases in project fields as various as biotechnologies, materials sciences, optoelectronics, applied mathematics, etc.
Cultural Development Our growing involvement in projects linked to Culture and Development is a strategic orientation that grows organically with Intermas, since it fits both the personal interests of its senior members and some of our country’s widely acknowledged Distinct Competences. On the occasion of our continuous involvement in the Black Sea Area, three years ago we have formulated and exposed to the ‘International Development Cooperation -HellenicAid’ of the Greek Ministry of Foreign Affairs, a frequent supporter of our development proposals, what we call Cultural Development Diplomacy. The case is for Greece to adopt, support and deploy such a policy in order to claim priority for the assignment of missions of ‘Cultural Development Diplomacy’ within the recent coordination and the division of thematic fields among its EU members. Such a claim for the adoption of activities with economic-development content can be based on three widely recognized distinct characteristics and competitive advantages of our Cultural experience. (a) Greece has indeed developed through the years the appropriate laws and state bodies plus a wide private business base around the ‘museum copies’ technologies and businesses. (b) Museums and archaeological sites with Antique, Hellenistic Greco-Roman and Byzantine content, abound in several countries along the Black and Mediterranean Seas and not only. (c) Cultural, eco and agro-tourism are development paths which have to show a dynamic growth and numerous success examples. Based on the above reasoning, we have planned and we continue to plan carefully, a series of international development activities of cultural and techno-cultural nature with the purpose to assist countries in the region of our involvement and in need to create revenues out of their cultural heritage. Background Competencies Our current consulting interests as described already are the outcome of our past involvement in numerous fields of activities. Almost two decades of learning experience in consulting, is organized today in what we call, our in-house “corporate memory” that is based on the corporate continuity of our core team and on its coaching and mentoring skills relation to our younger generation of consultants. These “background competences” include: Aspects of Regional Economic Development and Investment Promotion The Regional Development experience and activities of Intermas and its partners, are mostly linked to Sustainable Tourism and Cultural Development issues as well as to the Investment Promotion consulting for specific areas. Such activities are undertaken in close cooperation with offices and experts specializing in Regional Development while our in-house expertise is instrumental in the fields of Small and Medium Enterprise (SME) development potential assessment, in the surveys of the regional industry including its technological infrastructure and in the preparation of Investment Promotion files for specific industrial sectors. Privatization and Industrial Restructuring- Reorganisation During the period 1997-2003, the company and its key members have implemented numerous World Bank - financed expertise and restructuring management consulting projects abroad, for industrial concerns of various sizes operating in several sectors of the economy. Senior Intermas members have assumed team leadership in the WB effort to privatize, reorganize, turn and link to the market economy all major industrial concerns of the post soviet period in Georgia and to build the necessary local consulting capabilities, to sustain change. Restructuring and reorganization activities were including the redefinition and down-sizing of their activities, the establishment of Joint Ventures (JVs) with western businesses as well as training, coaching and appropriate staffing those privatized enterprises. (Fields of involvement: Flour Mills, Industrial bakeries, Pasta Factories, Dairies, Wine factories, Agro-plastics, Optoelectronics, Fine-machining, Prefab-Construction, Electrical apparatus, Pharmaceutical etc). International Industrial Marketing Intermas Consultants Ltd. shows a long-dating record of international industrial marketing activities. Its key senior members have been involved in export and consulting activities in foreign countries other than EU and USA, covering Middle East, Far East, Latin America and the Regional markets of Balkans, Black and Mediterranean Sea. International Industrial business concerns that have made use or still use our services include a number large engineering and industrial corporations and aggressive medium sized technologically advanced companies from Europe, North America and Canada. During the last 15 years Intermas has been instrumental in promoting on a fee basis to the Greek and international markets, industrial goods valued over 30 million Euros. In addition, its senior members are involved on a contractual consulting basis in the implementation of contractual offset obligations of foreign companies supplying equipment to the Greek Ministry of Defence. This last activity adds to the company’s long-lasting relation with several of the country’s key industries, active in advanced technological fields. Project Management All senior members have formal training and the company has extensive working experience in Project/Programme management in the fields of Real Estate, Industrial Engineering, Research & Development and Entrepreneurship. The company’s experience with Project Management dates back to the early 60s’ operational research techniques. Most relevant, the company operates in a programme management environment and has acquired an adequate knowledge and working experience under different types of funding schemes: National, European and International, and masters the various reporting requirements needed for the different project-types available. |
