ALTEC (www.altec.gr) is one of the biggest ICT actors in Greece, with activities on software, system integration, services and products and telecommunications, while also o perating subsidiary companies in Romania and Bulgaria.
The Software Business Unit of ALTEC involved in the project stems from Unisoft S.A. which was founded in 1983 and had quickly developed into one of the more dynamic software companies in Greece, leaving a positive mark in the national market for the quality of its products - it is worth to mention that KEFALAIO, a software suite for enterprise accounting still remains the only case of a killer application in Greece though more than 20 years have passed since its introduction in the market.
The Research Programmes Division of ALTEC (http://research.altec.gr) was founded in 1996 and since that time it has succeeded in opening up a set of novel research areas for the company.
However, if one tries to separate the actual contributions that really mattered in this period of time from marketing information we see that these can be mainly found in the area of connecting the corporate R&D resources with what happens in the outside world and especially the international research community.
This is not an easy task – it is rather a continuously ongoing and evolving activity – with its few successes and its many failures.
In the beginning of this journey, we were thinking that what we had to do is to change the way our company writes software. Close to this … misconception, there was another one: we also thought that we had to change the way our company identifies opportunities – be them business or market ones. At the end, and after many successful failures, we came to the conclusion that the only good way for exploiting the results of a research project is through the establishment of substantial links amongst all the people involved in both worlds namely the research projects and our corporate members. This is not always possible – and at a great extent is unfortunately outside the focus area of projects which have to deal with a lot of things in a limited time frame.
In the SAPHIRE project ALTEC leads the dissemination and IPR management activities. We are also responsible for creating the evaluation criteria and test bed for assessing the quality of the software components developed in the SAPHIRE. Additionally we are responsible for the pilot application assessment, including the development of a testing environment and the assessment criteria for this purpose.
Besides this, we are the providers of the PACE methodology (http://research.altec.gr/pace) that is used for the exploitation reporting activities carried out by our partner TEPE.
The driver for this work is to be able to capitalise on this after the project completion.
The residual value that relates to what we do in a project is in this respect the most important factor for doing something. But, again, this is a very subjective issue and one has to rely on instinct and his or her own feeling – and for this reason a European project like SAPHIRE is the perfect place for checking the validity of innovations and bridging the gap between an invention and an innovation (see for this the Communications of the ACM article on ‘ Innovation as Language Action; by Peter J. Denning and Robert Dunham which can be found as attachment in the next section – a rather superb introduction to the area).
This is not the right place to promote oneself but we are tempted to mention that ALTEC has been for second year included in the top EU corporate R&D investors according to the EU Industrial R&D Investment Scoreboard. T he scoreboard bases its list on annual audited company consolidated reports and accounts while it also provides information on other economic and financial data of the companies.
GAZETTE 
