It was great honour for me to be part of Skolkovo Technopark event yesterday. As I wrote in my earlier blog posts, I see it very important to start building the true entrepreneurship society in Russia. And the society is always built from the bottom-up. And definitely not top down. By making that happen, this society should be (and will be) then closely connected other global and regional societies (like www.aaltoes.com or http://miter.mit.edu/tag/Society )
It was excellent to see 700 people already in this first session to make this society a reality. We will continue this work in many forums and ways. This virtual Skolkovo will be also in key role in a future to share the knowledge of Russian entrepreneurs, students, investors and universities. By doing that, we want to share all learning’s of success and failures of entrepreneurs. Thanks for Sergey Kurilov @Skolkovo Technopark (sk@sk.ru ) and his team for making this first session happen!
The topic of our first joint session was to focus on next steps of Skolkovo and about the success factors of our great start-up companies. All the Skolkovo clusters / industries were present and a lot of energized entrepreneurs.
In my part of the plenary session, I was sharing my non-academic and quite straightforward approach to the topic: Our key task, as a Skolkovo Foundation, is give all the possible support for companies to really speed-up and shorten the critical phases 1 and 2. For any start-up entrepreneur it is easy and cosy to stay behind the desk and make endless loops of planning, planning and planning – without testing the idea with true customers. Well, in todays world, most of the great innovations are created jointly with business partners and pilot customers. And in this game, time-to-market is really crucial factor. Some people call this as crowdsourcing or networked economy product creation model. Well, you can use whatever words you like, but the true key is to get all the possible ideas, even contracting ones, from the potential users and customers.
You can get my few slides used in the session from (2.5 megabyte PDF) here (in Russian) and here (in English ).
I really hope to get your feedback, ideas and comments thru this blog system. There were some technical problems earlier (sorry for that, my mistake in settings), but now everyone can comment. Share anything what you think is valuable for the other community members.
Regards, Pekka, email bulldozer@sk.ru