James Iademarco is President of Strategic Avalanche, a global biotech consulting firm delivering powerful ideas with impact for both emerging venture backed startups and multi-nationals. Focused primarily on agriculture, animal nutrition and renewable materials his team of 35+ consultants strengthen clients’ critical fundamentals for strategy and innovation to achieve top-line growth and long-term sustainable profits.

James has over 30 years of international business management and innovation experience across diverse industries and has worked for both Fortune 500 and cutting-edge entrepreneurial companies. Clients benefit from unique insights as he has sat on both sides of the table and managed through diverse and complex corporate cultures.

After spending 16 years at Monsanto in sales, marketing, and P&L business management across the agricultural and chemical divisions, he entered the biotechnology space joining Diversa in 2001. There he led several business development platforms including enzymes for chemicals, food and animal nutrition. Later in 2005 he joined Bayer CropScience in RTP, NC to build a biomaterial portfolio leveraging proprietary in-planta seed and trait technologies across R&D sites in Belgium, France, and Germany. In 2015, he was appointed President and COO of publicly traded Marrone Bioinnovation and tasked with chartering a new growth strategy for their extensive crop biological portfolio. Today, animal nutrition and crop biologicals are two of three key pillars of the consulting practice. Now more than ever, Strategic Avalanche helps clients differentiate themselves in the very competitive and challenging agricultural and food industry.

Prior to founding Strategic Avalanche, he lived in the Netherlands and led DSM’s Biobased Chemical and Materials team which not surprisingly translated into a solid foundation around renewables, the third pillar of his firm. At DSM, James and his team formed a JV with Roquette Freres and successfully scaled biobased succinic acid to 10,000 tons of fermentation capacity with best-in class technology. Fast forward a decade later, and the demand for renewable and biodegradable materials are experiencing a resurgence with stronger tailwinds supported by investment and emerging technologies. The usual suspects like climate change, water quality, and waste pollution remain dauting challenges and more clients are seeking external perspective and expertise to increase their probability of success in solving them.

James was a seminar leader for the American Management Association and taught courses on product innovation and pricing strategy and introduces this experience and thinking into client engagements. Mr. Iademarco holds an undergraduate degree in Biomedical and Chemical Engineering from Vanderbilt University. He earned his MBA from Columbia University and completed executive education at Wharton (USA) and IMD (Switzerland) business schools. His team calls the USA and Europe home, and he and his family reside in Raleigh, North Carolina.