The Startup Village that announced Skolkovo’s Innovation Centre to the world last year is undergoing a spectacular reboot for 2014
Everything from number of participants to the area of the venue is scaling up as the two-day huddle for progressive thinkers and investors widens considerably for its second edition.
Startup Village is the biggest startup event on the calendar. Featuring more than 10,000 participants with 3,000 startups, 500 investors, 1,000 partners and 500 guests, it is known as “the startup for startups.”
The broader purpose of the Startup Village is to encourage growth in a new branch of the economy by convincing investors to back new technologies that can change lives.
Startup Village is a technology conference for new companies held at the Skolkovo Innovation Centre outside Moscow on June 2-3. But it’s not your stiff airport-hotel gathering with brown suits and clinking glasses.
The Startup Village has been nicknamed “innovative Woodstock.” The Turkish bazaar of technological advancement.
It’s a jeans-and-t-shirts meeting of new minds and entrepreneurs that does away with the stuffy air of academia, encouraging a friendly yet forthright exchange of ideas, opinions and, when all’s said and done, bank details.
Here you’ll get next-generation drones buzzing around with live rock music blaring in the background. You’ll discover advancements in biomedicine, attend open sessions devoted to nuclear technology and hear master-classes from the leaders of the global investment and business community.
Building on last year’s success, the 2014 edition will feature foreign startups too, cementing the Startup Village as a truly global initiative.
“We’re inviting them through partner technology parks in China and Finland,” says Ekaterina Inozemtseva, the Skolkovo Foundation’s director of strategy. “They’re not coming just to listen to what’s going on, but also to take part in the competitions,” she adds.
Should all the foreign entities make it to the Startup Village, “it would be really great,” says Inozemtseva. “Then we’d have a more international status.”
“Last year we had foreign speakers, of course, but not one foreign startup. So we’re really hoping to have some this year,” she says.
Two certainties for this year are Peter Vesterbacka, one of the creators of the Angry Birds mobile game series, and Finnish company Startup Saunas, says Inozemtseva.
The 2014 programme is split into three parts: The Conference, the Startup Market and the Startup Teams Competition.
The Conference features talks from experts on the cutting edge of their trade. There are master-classes and pragmatic individual training sessions that help inventors, innovators and entrepreneurs get their ideas off the ground, to turn abstract and sometimes hazy visions into very real, marketable products.
The Startup Market is a colourful array of counters and pavilions that showcase the front line of technology. Visitors are free to wander, mingle and peruse to their hearts’ content, testing out prototype gadgets for themselves and getting briefed on the latest offerings from the science community.
The Startup Teams Competition sees 200 fledgling companies try to out-pitch each other in four product areas: The digital world; health; energy technology; and new industrial technologies. A panel of judges comprised of investors, corporations and researchers will whittle the field down to 20 startups for the final day, and the top three companies will receive prizes ranging from 900 000 rubles for victory to 150 000 for just making the final. The pitch-sessions will be an ongoing feature of the two-day Startup Village.
Startup Village producer Alina Suslova says the main outdoor stage has a seating capacity of 2,000 and a giant awning just in case of bad weather. A small stage will host master-classes and partner presentations in a more intimate setting design especially for greater interaction.
According to Alexander Chernov, a vice-president of the Skolkovo Foundation, visitors will feel an atmosphere more akin to a traditional Russian village than a technology park, raising the prospect of a truly warm welcome for the guests from overseas.
Two new additions to this year’s event are a separate marquee for the Skoltech, short for the Skolkovo Institute of Technology and Science, and the participation of non-Skolkovo companies in the Startup Market.
The Startup Market is to have the hustle-and-bustle feel of a genuine bazaar, with some 50 projects on display. Among the non-Skolkovo projects will be those in conjunction with the Moscow city government, as well as two entities that promote small businesses: the Russian Venture Company and the Bortnik Foundation.
Gadget connoisseurs might make a beeline for the Skoltech tent, where robots and drones will battle it out in a series of competitions.
The pitch-sessions, for their part, are to take place in four marquees, where any investor attending the Startup Village will have to opportunity to become a judge.
The whole event will have a natural, environmentally friendly buzz to it, with baskets of vegetables and carts of fruit dotted around, Suslova says. Cows were a feature of last year’s event and even became its unofficial symbol.
“This year the cows are changing their appearance,” she hinted.
The Startup Village sets out to create honest dialogue in an open atmosphere with the greatest possible degree of socializing, networking and interacting, Suslova adds.
“We’re aiming for maximal interaction at the forum, and there must be no closed-off zones whatsoever.”
To provide extra zip to the proceedings and help the visitors navigate their way around the Startup Village, organisers are recruiting 150 volunteers, some of whom worked at February’s Winter Olympics in Sochi.