Komno is a market access and business origination consultancy based in Perth, Western Australia.

Every engagement is delivered personally by Anne-Sophie Gintzburger, the principal. Collection is handled by a research team sized to the engagement. Verification, analysis and all client-facing work stay with her.

The approach centres on one question: who holds authority, and on what basis. It was developed through doctoral research at the École normale supérieure de Lyon, completed in 2013, comparing how three jurisdictions within one nominal system constitute authority and how that differs across the Middle East, Southeast Asia and Pakistan. The same questions apply to a supply chain or a vendor ecosystem.

During the doctorate it was also applied commercially in The Shariah Report 2012, published with Failaka Advisors in Paris, a directory profiling the individuals who held authority across an industry. She also contributed a chapter to Wiley’s Islamic Capital Markets and published in Economic Papers.

Since 2015 the method has been applied in financial services, industrial manufacturing and certification, mining and energy, IT asset disposal, critical infrastructure and cyber security.

Since 2015 the method has been applied commercially in financial services, industrial manufacturing and certification, mining and energy, IT asset disposal, critical infrastructure and cyber security.

In each sector the analysis asks who owns what, who decides and whose approval counts. A bank and a mine give different answers, but the questions stay the same. The method transfers to any sector where authority is concentrated and partly informal.

Anne-Sophie Gintzburger grew up between France and the Middle East, watching her father work in countries where he had few contacts and build international cooperation from those first relationships.

She works in French and English, with conversational Levantine Arabic from seven years’ residence in the Levant, and is an Australian and French citizen with unrestricted right to work in Australia and the EU.

Komno was coined in 2014 from communa terreno, an invented compound of Latin and Portuguese. It means what French means by terrain d’entente, for which English has no good single word: not just a place where two parties meet, but ground on which they can agree. Contracted to its first and last syllables it gave comno, and the c became a k, for knowledge. The mark is the same idea — a meeting point at the centre, and a K that reads from either side.

It was not an abstract choice. Across cultures and social classes, standing between people with little in common has been the constant for her, something like the hyphen in Anne-Sophie.