Biography

Dr. Stephen L. Gomes has built a successful consulting practice focused on assisting clients to achieve high performance results with their domestic and international high-tech startups, strategic alliances and joint ventures.  His specialty is startup executive management, strategy, and leadership.   He uses a market-tested combination of proven best practices and his experience in working with clients in a wide variety of domestic and international business environments to overcome the challenging obstacles which are commonly encountered with nearly all startups.  

His clients have included Wells Fargo, EQUATE, ARAMCO, Bechtel, NASA, Mobil Oil, IBM, American Management Association, Canadian Management Association and many others. His assignments have ranged from helping NASA create and implement a $100 million 80-member technology development R&D consortia to assisting in the regeneration and mediation of an under-performing strategic alliance for the Industrial Gas Technology non-profit research foundation.   

He has assisted in the development of over twenty startup clients and helped set up numerous strategic business alliances. His clients often required him to design and facilitate technology transfer joint ventures and assist with alliance mediations and interventions using a variety of proprietary approaches.  In addition, he has designed and led numerous graduate MBA school courses and corporate seminars on the best practices for managing startups, creating successful strategic alliances in all phases of the modern corporation value chain including technology R&D, outsourcing (procurement, supplier, human resources and facilities), channel distribution, and marketing and sales.    

Prior to forming Gomes and Company, for three years, Dr. Gomes was a partner in the Warren Company, founded by Robert Porter Lynch, author of the Business Alliance Guide.  He held the position of Manager of the San Francisco Office.  Some of his Warren Company clients included Mobil Oil, Andersen Consulting (now Accenture), Wells Fargo Bank, Telus Corporation of Canada, TETCO, Trammel Crow, SCB Technologies, Wallis Companies, University of Alberta, UNOCAL, and British Petroleum. He was responsible for assisting clients in the development and implementation of new strategic alliances and leading executive seminars and workshops on “best practices” in strategic alliances.   

Before joining the Warren Company, Dr. Gomes was recruited for the position of Chief Executive Officer of American Technology Initiative (AmTech), a NASA affiliated Silicon Valley corporation dedicated exclusively to the implementation of public-private technology development alliances and facilitated technology transfer and commercialization partnerships.  The executive selection search team selected Dr. Gomes to join the organization for his innovative management and growth ideas. His primary task was to expand the annual volume of structuring technology co-development alliances.  During his nearly three-year tenure, he succeeded in expanding the size of the revenue and the volume of alliance implementation deal flow from a eight hundred thousand dollars per year to a gross volume of completed alliances of $160 million in 1994.  

Prior to joining Am Tech, Dr. Gomes was employed with Bechtel Corporation's headquarters' office in San Francisco for ten years.  His last position was Manager of International Marketing for the Technopolis Development Department. He has had extensive experience with working with numerous high level client representatives in the Middle East including the Minister of Defense and Aviation in Saudi Arabia, ARAMCO, Bechtel-Saudi Arabia Operations, Jeddah International Airport, Dahran International Airport Authority and Riyadh International Airport Authority. One of his projects required him to design the five-year master expansion and operations plan for the Aviation Division of ARAMCO which operated the largest private aircraft fleet in the world from Boeing 747s to numerous F27s and over fifty helicopters. 

Dr. Gomes is a specialist in the formation and implementation of technology alliances and consortia.  He has written several papers on the art and science of competitive collaboration, and the facilitation process for third-party implementation of technology development alliances and partnerships.  He has helped develop a unique set of partner identification and selection tools which have proven effective in achieving high-performance strategic business alliances. In January 1996, Stanford University published his paper entitled, "The Role of Third-Party Facilitators in Public-Private R&D Collaborations in the United States."  

Gomes received a Ph.D. in Public and International Management from the University of Pittsburgh where he studied on a NASA doctoral fellowship grant focused on management of large-scale complex technical enterprises, international business and political economics. He has extensive foreign assignment experience began with a two- year assignment to Brazil with the Peace Corps. During his career to date, he has done marketing and project management in 108 countries.  Primary areas of geographic focus have been the Far East including the extensive assignments in the People's Republic of China, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Singapore and Hong Kong; the Middle East primarily Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Kuwait and Bahrain; Europe including extended assignments in Greece, France, England, Ireland and Switzerland; and Russia. He has served as a consultant and advisor to national, state, and local governments as well as leading US and foreign corporations in joint venture projects, alliances, economic and technology competitiveness strategies and regional economic development. For a two-year period Dr. Gomes also held a senior position with the Howard Hughes Aviation Division in Las Vegas, Nevada where at the age of 23 he was in charge of the proposed new international Las Vegas super jetport project. 

Dr. Gomes is an expert in the use of highly effective techniques to promote creativity, productivity and synergy in knowledge and information-based organizations. He lectures widely on why developing internal competency in applying "best practices" in business alliance strategies is one of the principal keys to the generation of wealth in the post-industrial, highly-networked information economy. During the winter quarter 1997-1998, he taught a graduate course at the Oregon Graduate Institute (OGI) on "The Fundamentals of Strategic Alliances" in the Masters of Science and Technology Program. In September, 1998, he was awarded a faculty fellowship for the 1998-1999 winter quarter to pursue continuing research in understanding the keys to achieving success in high performance alliances in today’s networked business environment. He is also teaching a Master’s of Science and Technology course entitled “A “Practicum in Technology Commercialization”. He also taught start up management at the University of Maastricht Masters of Business program in the Netherlands from 2010-2012 and with the State University of New York at Stoney Brook’s Korea campus. 

He is also a Fellow of the IC2 Institute (now the TANDO Institute), founded by Dr. George Kozmetsky (co-founder of Teledyne Corporation and former Dean of the Graduate School of Business at the University of Texas).