About us

It started with one conviction: industry does not have to fall behind

September 2014. In Kielce, a city with industry written into its identity, the Industrial Development Foundation opens its doors. Not as a consultancy with a business plan for a quick return, but as a non-profit organisation put together by people who wanted to get things done.

We kept meeting companies with thirty years behind them, a great product, and a machine park whose newest piece of equipment was the computer in the accounts office. And owners who knew something had to change - only nobody could tell them where to start, or where the money was supposed to come from.

The foundation exists so that someone can finally answer those two questions.

A business-environment institution - so who is that?

On paper we are a business-environment institution and a non-profit organisation. In practice it comes down to one thing: we do not earn in order to earn. It also means the money we make goes back where it came from - into the team’s skills, into our tools, into the next companies.

We pay our own way, entirely out of the services we sell. That is demanding, and it has one enormous advantage: our opinion is not owed to any grant provider. When we tell an owner an investment does not add up, we say it because it does not add up.

Our office is in the Kielce Technology Park at ul. Karola Olszewskiego 6, in the industrial north of the city. An address downtown would look better on a business card. This one is closer to the shop floor.

What we do

In brochure language: market-potential studies, analysis of investment financing options, business modelling, economic analysis, feasibility studies, business plans, funding applications, mentoring, coaching and digital transformation audits.

But that is a list of tools, not of the work. The work goes like this. We sit down with the owner and take the business apart. Where it actually makes money, and where it only looks like it does. Which processes can be automated within a year, and which have to be sorted out on paper first. Whether the investment they have had in mind for three years makes economic sense - and if it does, where to find the money for it.

We specialise in the two transformations that decide who stays competitive in Polish industry: the digital one - Industry 4.0, automation, robotics, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity - and research and development.

Family businesses - our natural client

A family business thinks in generations, not quarters. Its owner does not report a quarterly result to a supervisory board; they answer for what they will hand on to their children. That horizon calls for an adviser who also stays around: one who knows the company’s history and does not start from zero at every meeting.

So we build long-term relationships, based on trust and on work done properly. What that rests on is the team - small, tested, made up of specialists in finance, investment, management, economics, commercial law and internationalisation.

Anna Kaczor has run the foundation since day one, and Karol Kaczmarski joined the board in 2020. The continuity is deliberate: it is hard to build a ten-year relationship while changing people every two years.

A few things we are proud of

Over PLN 13 million for PGO Kielce. We worked on the project that won this municipal company more than 13 million zloty from the European Funds for Świętokrzyskie programme, to extend and modernise the waste treatment plant in Promnik: a new composting line, a rebuilt sorting hall, ventilation, a deodorisation system and modern equipment for the plant laboratory. Its capacity to recycle biodegradable waste will rise by roughly 67 per cent - less waste to landfill, more back in circulation.

The part we like best does not show up in the tables. Five carbon filters will cut nuisance odours by at least 90 per cent, and an accredited laboratory will verify that the system works. For people in the villages nearby, that is a change they will notice literally every day. The region gains one of the most modern waste-management installations in the country.

For us this is the model of what the work is for: European money turned into cleaner air and a benefit people can measure.

Roadmaps to Industry 4.0. We run audits and draw up transformation roadmaps to the requirements of the Polish Agency for Enterprise Development (PARP) in its competition for the automation and robotics of SMEs. Before a company spends millions on robots, somebody has to say honestly whether it is ready for them. We look at digital maturity, business processes, competitiveness, technology and IT infrastructure, and out of that comes a full plan for the move towards Industry 4.0, with one specific process or product innovation in automation, robotics or digitalisation.

We have done that work for Fullmet Wojciech Ciepliński Sp. z o.o. and Gwarant-Eko GEKO FILTRATION Sp. z o.o., among others - companies that did not want to robotise “because everyone is doing it”, but because they had worked out what they would get for the money.

That is our favourite part of the job, in fact: not selling technology, but helping someone decide which technology their company actually needs - and in what order.

Impact Factory. A project worth over PLN 1.2 million, with almost 831,000 zloty of funding from the European Funds for Świętokrzyskie 2021-2027 programme. We are using it to build three new service lines for SMEs: Business AI, Business R&D and Business Internationalisation. It is hard to advise companies on transformation with a straight face without having been through one yourself.

The networks we are part of. A partnership in the Kielce Digital Innovation Hub, the EUROPE DIRECT Jędrzejów information point, and Export Factory for companies ready to work outside Poland - because reliable knowledge should not stop at the city limits.

Evidence, not declarations

In consulting, anyone can describe themselves as professional. We would rather show what can be checked:

• ISO 9001 certification for training and consulting services, pro-innovation services included.
• Innovation Centre accreditation from the Association of Innovation and Entrepreneurship Centres in Poland (SOOIPP).
• Regional Innovation Centre accreditation, held since March 2025, granted by the Świętokrzyskie Regional Government - this is the one that lets us provide pro-innovation services with public funding.
• A rating of 4.4/5 from more than a hundred people who have used our services, in the Baza Usług Rozwojowych (BUR), the Polish development services database.

The last one means the most to us, because no committee awards that rating.

Bridges instead of islands

The Polish economy has a problem no single grant will fix: entrepreneurs, researchers and public institutions speak different languages and rarely sit at the same table.

Building bridges between them is not a line for a website, it is a description of the job. We translate the language of science into the language of production. The language of regulations into the language of investment decisions. The language of an owner who knows what they need but not how to write it into an application.

We work across Poland and outside it. And the moment we still like most is when a company we first drove out to with an audit switches on its first new line. That is when it is clear what all of this was for.