With its abundance of natural resources and formidable intellectual capital, Tomsk is a city that is perfectly placed to speed the diversification of the Russian economy through, Deputy Prime Minister Arkady Dvorkovich said on stage two of the Russian Startup Tour on Wednesday.
Arkady Dvorkovich speaking at the Russian Startup Tour in Tomsk on Wednesday. Photo: sk.ru
The tour rolled into Siberia this week on its mission to find and nurture high-tech startups and give them the tools they need to commercialize their ideas.
“Tomsk practically has it all – from oil and gas to nuclear physics and the atomic-industrial complex, an innovations zone, various manufacturing and science,” he said in remarks at the Tomsk Engineering Center, which is hosting the two-day event.
The Center is within Tomsk’s 200-hectare federal Special Economic Zone, which has 58 resident companies taking advantage of a wealth of benefits to accelerate their business.
“Every region has its own advantages … we need to provide focused support to each concrete region, and this is what Skolkovo and other development institutes are aiming to do,” Dvorkovich said.
Dvorkovich, who is on Skolkovo’s board of trustees, was speaking at the panel session themed “Russia’s Innovative Landscape.”
He revealed the Industry and Trade Ministry is working on an import-substitution program that will be ready by April.
“We need to have more serious potential [in domestic production],” Dvorkovich said. “This will be a list of concrete goods and services of which we want to create our own versions.”
Meanwhile, Governor Sergei Zhvachkin was quoted by the RIA Tomsk news agency that his city was Russia’s most active in the field of inventions, and fourth in the country in the sphere of innovations.
“Startups are very important. As governor, I consider it my task to act as a bridge between the startup and production,” he said.
The tour was launched last week in the southern city of Rostov-on-Don, where Skolkovo president Victor Vekselberg told more than 100 startup CEOs: “We want you to have the confidence that if you have an idea, this idea will find support in us, to try to make it happen.”
The Tomsk City Government is a strong backer of small and medium-sized enterprises, with a program in place that includes competitive grants, subsidies and logistics support to help businesses get off the ground.
The Tomsk State University of Control Systems and Electronics is one of the top innovations institutions in the country, while the Tomsk State National Research University is the oldest and best in Siberia, renowned as a “territory of innovation” with 12 collective use centers, the Inter-University Center for Technical Innovation and a host of other top facilities.