Inside Skolkovo’s IT cluster, a handful of early-stage companies involved in mobile technology are undergoing an acceleration program designed to get their innovations to market faster.
“Accelerating” startups is one of the Skolkovo Foundation’s key tasks, and an important mechanism in the wider goal of kick-starting the diversification of the Russian economy.
Six Skolkovo startups have been selected for the six-month program: “IBRiS”, PeerFile, Svet, Navigine, TopView and NettleBox. They had to fight for their place – ten companies were shortlisted from dozens of applicants and went head to head in a pitch battle in April.
The program is restricted to companies engaged in mobile technology, but open to residents in any of the foundation’s five clusters: IT, biomed, nuclear, energy and space. It is intended to help companies build and verify their business model, to make their first sales and to secure seed investment of up to $250,000.
Participating startups get up to $20,000 to achieve a series of agreed goals, culminating, ideally, in more serious investment and a long-term, sustainable business plan.
That money, in return for equity, is put up by Skolkovo partner Ideal Machine, a St. Petersburg startup accelerator, which had a say in which companies are admitted to the program.
The program doesn’t cost the participants a dime. But what does it consist of?
Expert sessions, weekly tracking, open master-classes and lectures and private debriefing seminars for residents. Expert sessions have concrete aims, and are tailored to the needs of specific startups, all of which are at slightly different stages of development and have different weak points.
The last session, on July 10, was attended by nine experts from business environment, technological, venture investment and other spheres.
“Teams solve different problems. For example, one company now is solving the problem of sales channel economy convergence and improving efficiency. Another is working on going viral in B2C. A third is trying to understand how to present itself on social network channels to build upon its customer base. A fourth startup is product-testing and wants to try out crowdfunding. And concerning all questions and problems all the experts have vital skills they are ready to share,” said Vasily Ryzhonkov, an IT cluster project manager who heads up the newly formed Mobile Tech Hub..
The experts on hand at the July 10 session, for instance, were the managing partner of Sapfir Capital, Alexander Zhurba; the strategic business development manager of Intel, Vadim Sukhomlinov; Microsoft strategic technology expert Alexander Belotserkovsky; Microsoft project manager Polievkt Pchelintsev; the chief of Solomoto partner programs Mark Verezubov; the founder of the company Moi Sklad, Askar Rahimberdiev; the executive director of GVA LaunchGurus Zamir Shukhov, and the technology evangelist of Voximplant, Grigoriy Petrov.
The expert session on July 10. Photo: sk.ru
“The main idea behind the expert sessions is to shorten the path to experts for companies. It is impossible for teams to discuss and solve all of their problems with experts during a 30 minute meeting, but they can evolve a plan and then keep in touch with the experts. It is extremely useful. The second aspect is an opportunity to get a quick feedback from different experts concerning different questions,” Ryzhonkov added.
But how do you measure the success of an acceleration program? It depends on the specific goals of the participants, says Ryzhonkov.
Experts meet with the startups and set a final target, which can range from a dollar figure in investment, to number of unit sales or number of markets entered.
“We can see the result of accelerator’s working in the form of startup revenues and new customers,” says Ryzhonkov. “Then we can say projects are successful. We expect that the companies will start demonstrating the main results after two or three months, in other words this autumn we can evaluate real results in figures,” he added.
Should the program show signs of promise, organizers may expand it across other Skolkovo projects.
The signs, so far, are good. “We see that these strategic sessions can be in demand by Skolkovo residents,” Ryzhonkov said.