Inogate increases presence in the Argentinean Market

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Vida Económica (13-03-2009)

The Portuguese company, specialized in Innovation Management, celebrates a new contract with Tenaris – one of the largest economic groups from Argentina.

Inogate, a company specialized in Innovation Management, gives continuity to its internationalization plan by closing a new contract with Tenaris.

Tenaris is the second biggest economic group in Argentina, with annual sales   23 billion US dollars/year (more than 17.7 billion €) and employs about 25 thousand people in 10 different countries. And what is this contract for?

Inogate’s CEO, Paulo Janeiro, says that besides “an important exportation of technology and know-how in the innovation area”, this is also strong evidence that “demonstrates Inogate’s success in extremely advanced sectors”. It is something that actually has a meaning, when it comes to practice: Inogate is going to help Tenaris to solve, through research and development (R&D) methodologies, the problems that result from the creation of complex new products. But this is not all.

Paulo Janeiro explains that as a support of these methodologies “is being implemented a collaborative software tool that simplifies the inclusion of these new methodologies in the company’s practices”. This tool, allied to an extensive knowledge data base, will also allow Tenaris to analyze the latest technologic trends of the market. This way, it is possible to “define with precision the technologic ‘roadmap’ of the company”, concludes Paulo Janeiro.

And is it easy to do it all? How do other markets face innovation?

Here, Paulo Janeiro testifies that “the way Innovation is seen does not vary radically from one market to another.” There are “specific needs in each sector”, for which Inogate adapts the available solutions. As a standard, adds Paulo Janeiro, the “company always needs to obtain tools that allow to manage, in real time, new ideas, and turn those ideas into new opportunities, so that later they can be materialized with success”. What changes is “the level, the focus and the timing that the company has to apply. As for the basic concepts, those are structural and applicable to all organizations”, he reveals.

The option for the Portuguese and Spanish speaking Markets

How did Inogate approach the Argentinean market?

Paulo Janeiro explains that this option emerges – and we have to remember that this company has an office in Argentina – from the fact that Inogate has a “natural appetency for the Portuguese and Spanish speaking countries”. The “internationalization process started in Spain and, by that time, it was already part of the company’s future orientation to expand to Latin America”, he reveals.

Inogate’s physical presence in Argentina results from the fact that by the time the expansion to Latin America begun, the company had several commercial operations in course in that country.  Today, this office already covers other markets from the same region, as the Brazilian and the Mexican.  But Inogate doesn’t intend to stop here.

The company’s goals are ambitious, with Paulo Janeiro stating that the company “is consolidating its position in this market”. This is the first step towards new business in USA – one of the next steps shall be the Northern American continent –, and Europe. He also adds: “Currently, our priority is to investment to set up a global structure”. The idea is to be able to provide coaching and innovation services locally to make Inogate a “glocal” company, and not just a Latin one. By “glocal” we refer to a worldwide presence, based on several offices distributed all over the world.

You can download the original news in Portugues.