A company that has been established right after the restoration of the independance of Latvia in 1991, has seen it all. The wild 90-ties and the promising 00’s, being pioneers in everything and learning from their mistakes they have built their business from a scratch. Being members of the first business incubator in Latvia – Latvian Technological Center (LTC), ELMI Ltd. celebrated 30 year anniversary last year in the IT and technology market. Today the company has more than 1000 active clients, more than 900 projects per year and provide at least 100 consultations daily.
The company founder and director Ivans Mironovs is a tough and focused person. Both of his sons have grown up togther with the company Elmi Ltd. and now work for it as well: “At the beginning the idea was to survive and build a business to self-sustain. Then we discovered we can do more and actually create a product and service that is not only highly required but also quite exclusive. Later on we just kept evolving. And today with the assistance of Enterprise Europe Network we are still aiming to achieve more.”
All of these years Elmi Ltd. has been into research and development with their own resources, attracting researchers and nurturing ones within their own team. Elmi Ltd. has been familiar with technology transfer services since 1997 and IRC Network. During 15 years of Enterprise Europe Network (EEN) Elmi has signed several technology collaboration contracts with partners from Germany, Great Britain and other European countries. With the late energy crisis and disruptions of supply chains the need for reorientation and digitalization has been important more than ever. Elmi Ltd. felt Industry 4.0 was the direction to go. Eventually it transformed to Industry 5.0. Therefore they contacted a long-term partner – Enterprise Europe Network – with a request to extend their knowledge and competences in Industry 5.0, to improve production processes and raise their competitiveness.
Ints Viksna, director of LTC: “The problem with the European Union support is the lack of synergy. There are tons of excellent projects and programmes, bright initiatives, but they do not collaborate, they do not contribute to a common result. Sometimes even the opposite – they compete between each other blocking the advancement which is a bit of sad and a waste of resources. Due to the extensive experience of our specialists and wide knowledge of the innovation eco-system we created a synergy of several projects and offered it to the company as a joint solution towards Industry 5.0.”
Firstly, the digital evaluation scan of ADMA TranS4MErs project was carried out to identify the weak spots in the company performance. Then it was decided to take advantage of the FIT-4-NMP project including travel grants to send the company to in-depth training workshops. In result the client was capable to identify it’s mid-term aims and plans. According to the specific targets and the audit results EEN specialists attracted project partners with whom at the beginning of this year a project PROSPECT 5.0 was submitted under the Horizon Europe programme. It is already known the project has been granted financing for Industry 5.0 development and raising competencies. Moreover this project reiceived 15 out of 15 points in the evaluation which is very rare.
Ints Viksna: “Working with our EEN clients we always aim for the client-centric approach. Prioritizing the needs and interests of the client and combining multiple resources available allows us to offer the client best possible solutions. Big manufacturer or small university spin-off – every client counts as there is a place and space for everyone in the innovation eco-system. Only together these players contribute to both local and global economy towards sustainability. As for Elmi Ltd. – stay tuned because once they have completed the PROSPECT 5.0 project there are more exciting news to come!”
