As one drives up to the Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology – the key node of the suburban Moscow innovation hub referred to as Russia’s Silicon Valley – the multicolored building that emerges looks like a modern art project straight out of Sweden, as though the traffic jams and Soviet highrises you just passed weren’t really there.
Whether revolutionary (according to its cheerleaders) or a Potemkin village (according to its critics), one thing Skolkovo is destined to be is half foreign. That, in the eyes of its creators, is the point.
“Tomorrow, if a foreign scientist starts to understand that working in Russia isn’t exotic but normal, that working with us is the same as working in Sweden, Germany or America, that will be the solution to the brain drain question,” Deputy Prime Minister Vladislav Surkov – the former Kremlin ideologist and one of Skolkovo’s key masterminds – told The Moscow News during a briefing with journalists last week.
Leap of faith
Surkov emerged beaming from the first meeting of the Institute’s board of trustees, which took place last week. For him, whether or not the Institute would manage to transform that 400 hectare swath of land west of Moscow into a window to Europe wasn’t just about the construction. “The most important thing to emerge out of that meeting was a feeling of faith,” he told journalists.
That faith, he said, had infected Russia’s state corporations, which were set to invest up to 1 percent of their innovation budgets into the Skolkovo Tech endowment, which is expected to reach some $500 million by the end of the year and $2 billion by 2020.
Rosneft, the state oil company headed by Vladimir Putin’s key ally Igor Sechin, is spearheading this investment drive, Surkov said.
Much like Stanford for Silicon Valley, Skolkovo Tech is poised to become the driving force behind the Skolkovo project, a planned innovation city that aims to draw up to 30,000 people from Russia and abroad (developers are hoping that half of the residents, faculty, and students will be foreigners).
And while the institute has yet to start operating, some 500 professors, officials and government representatives – even the flamehaired former spy Anna Chapman – gathered for its second proposal conference last Monday to present ideas for 15 research, education and innovation centers. Each center would receive up to $12 million in financing.
Short-circuiting the brain drain
Given the sense of ambition that has surrounded Skolkovo since construction began in 2010, skepticism about the project was inevitable. And if Skolkovo was aiming to be unique, its status as an island of innovation and modernization in a country plagued by infrastructure problems seemed to underscore just how far behind the rest of the Russia was.
“You are financing foreign scientists!” a Russian journalist kept insisting to Ivan Sherstov, research director at Skolkovo Tech, at last week’s gathering. Sherstov explained patiently that integration was the whole point, that by allowing Western and Russian scientists to share know-how, they were fostering growth and exchange for the whole country. And if talented Russian innovators were going abroad, they might as well come back to Skolkovo. “We can’t stop the brain drain, but we can short-circuit it,” Shertsov told The Moscow News.
‘From the top’
There is one catch. Unlike California’s Silicon Valley, which developed spontaneously, Skolkovo is a project of the state.
Not just the financing, but the very idea for Skolkovo came from the top. As part of his modernization drive, then-President Dmitry Medvedev announced plans for an innovation center in November 2009, and appointed Vladislav Surkov to head a working group developing the concept. By spring, the Kremlin, joining efforts with oligarch Viktor Vekselberg, who would head the Skolkovo Foundation, had picked a site.
Though targeting Western companies and industries, the plans fitted perfectly with a Soviet pattern of the government creating cities from scratch around factories, universities and space centers. Surkov, laying out his vision for Skolkovo, didn’t shy from this legacy. “In the 1920s and 1930s there was the energy of fear,” he told Vedomosti in February 2010. “The Bolsheviks, out of fear… made Russia into an industrialized country.
“But a post-industrial society can’t be created out of fear. We need positive, creative energy. The aim of the new policy is extracting it from society.”
Two years on, had the innovation center managed to defy Russia’s infrastructure problems to foster the “creative energy” Surkov spoke of?
According to Seda Pumpyanskaya, Skolkovo vice president for international relations and communications, the project itself was a bid to help solve infrastructure problems.
“Somehow, things in Russia happen from the top,” Pumpyanskaya told The Moscow News. “Knowing our culture, our history, our specifics, I don’t think there was any other way than starting this project from the top. Later it should combine the top-bottom approach with growth from below.”
The Silicon Valley appellation had been a misleading analogy that happened to stick, she said.
“I personally don’t like it when Skolkovo is compared to Silicon Valley,” she said. “We use this comparison, but it’s not perfect. It’s a completely different concept.”
According to Pumpyanskaya, the very need for a project like Skolkovo arose due to infrastructure problems. “We’ve always had a lot of talented people, but we didn’t have infrastructure,” she said. “In the U.S., it’s a natural cycle. In Russia these things need to be created.”
The hope, she said, was that a unique, international hub could foster an approach to innovation that could spread outward.
Source: themoscownews.com