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 on biotechnology for agriculture, food and animal nutrition, chemicals, materials, and fuels 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 35 years of international business management and innovation experience across diverse industries having 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 more than a decade and a half at Monsanto in sales, marketing, and P&L business management across the agricultural and chemical divisions, he entered the biotechnology space. There at BASF Enzymes he led business development platforms for chemicals, food and animal nutrition commercializing novel enzymes that continue to gain market share today. He subsequently joined Bayer CropScience to lead global innovation and build a novel biomaterial portfolio leveraging proprietary output crop traits across R&D sites in Belgium, France, and Germany. James was an investment delegate for Bayer’s $50M venture capital fund with investments in food and agriculture. In 2015, he was appointed President and COO of Marrone Bioinnovation (NASDAQ MBII) and tasked with chartering a new growth strategy for its crop biological pipeline and the company was later acquired by Bioceres. Today, agriculture (food and feed nutrition and crop biologicals) are 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 10KT 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 daunting challenges and more clients are seeking external perspective and expertise to increase their probability of success in solving them.

Strategic Avalanche has ventured into best practice courses and seminars delivering proprietary best practice content for 3rd party collaborations and deal making strategies. Mr. Iademarco was a former seminar leader for the AMA on critical subjects like innovation and product development. He 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.