A conference of Russian Shared Services Centers was held at the Skolkovo Innovation Center on July 10, 2014. This was the first time that all key players of this industry gathered to discuss the main problems they were facing.
The Forum was held at Skolkovo Innovation Center's Hypercube, bringing together about 200 innovators interested in Collective Use (Shared Services) Centers. Andrey Sartori, R&D Services Director at Technopark Skolkovo, said that three key types of institutions, which had integrated while developing the system of Shared Services Centers in Russia, met with Skolkovo residents at the Forum.
Reps of collective use centers, who joined the club
"First of all, these are Shared Services Centers, i.e. commercial companies offering services on the market," said Mr. Sartori. "Secondly, there are customers — industrial companies, which are an indispensable element of the ecosystem. In addition, there are development institutes that can promote and support active cooperation between all elements of the Shared Services Center system," stated the R&D Services Director at Technopark Skolkovo.
Skolkovo Technopark CEO Renat Batyrov summed up the main goal of the Forum in an interview to Sk.ru as follows, "We would like the Shared Services Center community to develop a common policy and to gain a better understanding of how cooperation works at the national level. We may need to come up with a joint resolution calling for the development of new regulations for the benefit of the whole community.
"We want to create a community of suppliers and consumers of these services, a club of Shared Services Centers, if you will," said the Skolkovo Technopark CEO. And indeed this is what happened at the end of the forum: the Collective Use Center Club that Batyrov described was created under the auspices of Skolkovo, with the appropriate minutes signed and certificates handed out to all the club members.
According to Renat Batyrov, Collective Use Centers have proved their efficiency and market demand ("people needed them yesterday") and the number of Shared Services Centers accredited by Technopark is growing rapidly. At the start of this year there were just 14 of them, today there are 22, and by the end of the year Skolkovo Technopark plans to be working with over 30 Shared Services Centers. "When we started creating a chain of Shared Services Centers some time back, we realized very soon that providers of these services can offer top-quality services to our residents," Mr. Batyrov said.
"This, however, does not mean that companies shouldn’t create their own labs, which will be housed at the large Technopark once the building is completed. But all these companies will be working side by side with us, competing and developing," Renat Batyrov noted. The Forum was attended not only by Shared Services Centers already accredited or undergoing accreditation at Skolkovo, but by all organizations with which the Skolkovo Technopark would like to build relations in the future. The colleagues talked to each other and shared practical experience during the first section, "Selling Technology Services". Speakers included Sergey Khakhanov, CEO of the Microanalysis Shared Services Center, and Eugene Nesterov, Director of the Dana Engineering Shared Services Center. During the section, Sergey Pogrebnyakov, Development Manager at the Technopark Services and External Communications Department, presented a report on "Sales Growth Points for Common Services Centers", presenting the findings of sales funnel analysis.
The second part of the Forum featured a round-table discussion titled, "Forming the Open Innovations Market", which was attended by representatives of corporations, as well as federal and regional development institutes. Presenters included Ekaterina Bulycheva, Deputy CEO of the Moscow Innovation Development Center who, together with her Moscow colleague Leila Alieva (Deputy CEO of Technopolis Moscow), talked about the additional opportunities that are opening up for startups looking for various technology labs and Shared Services Centers in the Russian capital. Aleksey Knyazev, Deputy Governor of Tomsk Oblast for Research and Education Complex and Innovation Policy, shared his opinion on how companies specializing in innovations should promote and sell their services. Mats Nordlund, Vice President for Research at Skoltech, talked about how big corporations in cooperation with local authorities and universities are helping to build a technology cluster that is raising R&D assets, including Shared Serves Centers, to a new level of involvement in the economy. Nordlund also talked about how startups are establishing cooperation with big corporations, citing the example of his work for Saab in Scandinavia. Igor Pyshmintsev, Deputy CEO of TMK for Research, and Denis Vdovin, head of KAMAZ’s Design Office, also talked about the specifics of working with big corporations.
The final section of the Forum included an announcement that the Shared Services Center Club had been established under the auspices of Skolkovo. Its members then stayed for a separate session that continued long after the round-table was over and ended with a friendly barbecue in front of the Hypercube, where Shared Services Center market players continued to have in-depth discussions about the industry’s problems and prospects with their Skolkovo colleagues.