In the dying snow flurries of 2014, as the Vnukovo plane trails dissipate silently into the Moscow sky, the Skolkovo Foundation can look back upon an eventful, challenging and ultimately successful year from its new, permanent home.
Snow settles at Skolkovo on Boxing Day, 2014. Photo: sk.ru
On paper, expectations were met or exceeded in every department. New multinational partners were found, key cooperation agreements were signed, prestigious international competitions were won, and fresh guarantees were issued from the government that this project to strengthen Russia’s economy through entrepreneurship and innovation would receive the financial backing it needed.
“These past 12 months have been remarkable,” said Skolkovo vice president Alexander Chernov. “This year has demonstrated how vital Skolkovo is becoming – both as an agent for domestic growth and as a regional and international hub for scientific exchange.”
But a very important psychological milestone was passed, too. For the first time, Skolkovo will see in the New Year from the eponymous village outside Moscow where a 400-hectare Innovation Center is rising up among the fields and fir trees.
In October, the Skolkovo Foundation moved from a skyscraper in downtown Moscow to the Technopark Office Center a mile to the west of the city. The next few months will see all manner of facilities sprout up, including the first stages of the Technopark R&D facilities and the Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology.
Since Dmitry Medvedev signed a presidential decree on the creation of Skolkovo in 2010, the project had been confined to the virtual domain. ‘Resident’ companies remained in their offices and labs around Russia and received the benefits of residency – tax breaks, mentorship, access to investment and grants - remotely.
But here, on October 4, was Skolkovo’s de facto birth as a physical innovations ecosystem: The first inhabitants of Russia’s answer to Silicon Valley have set about putting down roots. Companies are now in a position to begin evolving organically, to mingle with like-minded people and organizations, to set up joint projects and partnerships, and secure financing on the path to commercialization.
“We will live here for a long time; a very long time,” said Skolkovo Foundation president Viktor Vekselberg during the housewarming party.
Vekselberg, left, attending the housewarming. Photo: sk.ru
Otherwise, Skolkovo’s biggest event of the year was the Startup Village in June, a gathering of 10,000 companies, investors, mentors and media at the Hypercube. From the stage, Prime Minister Medvedev, one of Skolkovo’s biggest supporters, noted: “Skolkovo is a project for the accumulation of a critical mass of successful startups.”
If Skolkovo’s success is measured solely by that of its startups, then 2014 was a very good year.
It helped thrust Russia into the new space economy this summer as the R&D spinoff of Dauria Aerospace, a Skolkovo Foundation partner, sent the country’s first private satellite into orbit this summer.
In a landmark deal at the Open Innovations Forum in Moscow in October, Skolkovo resident Optogard Nanotech signed two deals worth a combined $41 million with China’s largest pipe manufacturer Shandong Trustpipe Industry.
Under the agreements, Optogard Nanotech will provide patented plasma laser technology for making super-hard coatings and surface modifications for Shandong’s pipes.
Optogard is one of Skolkovo’s most active startups and the flagship company of the Nuclear Technologies cluster. The Shandong deal came five months after Russia and China signed an historic $400 billion deal for Moscow to provide Beijing with Russian gas over the next 30 years.
Elsewhere, Vizerra, a Skolkovo resident that produces 3D modeling software, attracted around $5 million in investment from the asset management company Leader.
Vizerra was founded in Russia in 2008 but is now present on three continents after finding significant demand for its eye-popping and user-friendly 3D architecture-modeling platform.
Those deals were among a flurry of activity this year that has seen Skolkovo’s resident firms generate upwards of 20 billion rubles ($367 million) in revenue, Medvedev said earlier this month.
The year also saw a host of promising projects emerge.
The ExoAtlet prototype. Photo: ExoAtlet
The winner of the Startup Village pitch competition was ExoAtlet, producer of an exoskeleton that helps disabled people walk. The company received a 900,000 ruble grant to develop its prototype and is in testing before entering the market next year or in 2016.
ExoAtlet is the first company in Russia to deal with exoskeletons and is in the process of patent application for its technology, as CEO Ekaterina Bereziy said earlier this year.
Its medical-use model is to support movement for people with restricted limb function and rehabilitation for lower-limb trauma victims. It is designed to help overcome paralyses caused by cerebral apoplexy or spinal cord injury. It could also benefit sufferers of cerebral palsy and similar diseases.
Russia was thrust to the forefront of regenerative medicine this year too, as the country’s first 3D bioprinter was unveiled. A bioprinter is a machine that fabricates human cells, a technology that could revolutionize modern medicine by providing everything from skin grafts to replacement organs.
The Moscow-based firm 3D Bioprinting Solutions, a resident of Skolkovo’s Biomed cluster, presented its 3D bioprinter to the public at the Open Innovations Forum in October. The company led by renowned scientist Vladimir Mironov recognizes success is probably not imminent: Complete organ replacements are still more than a decade away, Mironov said, and though providing replacement skin tissue is a more immediate application of the technology, even that is at least four years off.
As Skolkovo’s residents toil away on their innovations, the foundation has been hard at work in boosting international ties.
The year’s biggest achievement in this sphere was the victory of the Skolkovo Technopark in bidding for the 2016 International Association of Science Parks World Conference, known informally as the “tech park Olympics.”
The vote was held in Doha at 31st IASP World Conference in October. A three-way Russian bid led by Skolkovo beat out competition from the Utrecht Science Park in the Netherlands and the Teknopark Istanbul. The partner bidders were MSU Science Park, Technopark Strogino and the Innovation Development Center of Moscow.
“This victory is obviously a sign that our first noticeable successes in Russia on the path to innovative development have been recognized," said Skolkovo VP Chernov. "Or at least it recognizes our intentions to move along this path and create a knowledge-based economy that I’m certain will, in the near future, replace the resource-based economy," he added.
In a humorous twist, Skolkovo Technopark director Renat Batyrov told sk.ru that an hour before the vote he was already being commiserated on defeat by an overconfident rival.
Batyrov’s team had lobbied every IASP member personally in the run-up to the vote, networking that will continue to pay dividends as Skolkovo seeks to increase its international reach.
The year also saw the foundation sign several cooperation agreements with other science parks around the world. The biggest was between Russia and China in October.
An agreement signed in Moscow before Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and his Chinese counterpart Li Keqiang, will oblige the Skolkovo Innovation Center to host a 200,000 sq. m. facility devoted to Russian and Chinese research projects.
In return, Russia will have access to a 4,000 sq. m tech park to be built in a new industrial facility in the city of Xi’an, the capital of Shaanxi province in the northwest of China.
The deal was aptly nicknamed the Silk Road, a reference to the transport route that connected European markets with those in the Far East, providing for trade in everything from fabrics to new technologies and scientific know-how.
And earlier this month, Skolkovo signed an agreement with India to ramp up cooperation in the high-tech sector, part of a raft of deals overseen by Russian President Vladimir Putin during a trip to New Delhi.
Medvedev overseeing the Panasonic partnership deal. Photo: sk.ru
One of the most satisfying developments of a politically and economically tough year, meanwhile, was a vote of confidence by Skolkovo’s leading partners including Microsoft and Siemens, who insisted the current turbulence would not blow them off course.
The foundation’s partner companies, mainly multinational giants of industry, form a crucial part of the Skolkovo ecosystem: By investing in R&D at the Skolkovo Innovation Center they have access to its lab facilities, intellectual capital and tax breaks while also passing on their knowledge to the local innovation community and help commercialize Russian innovations on international markets.
“Obviously the climate is challenging, and we all realize that,” Microsoft’s senior director Alexey Palladin told sk.ru on the sidelines of the meeting, which brought together representatives from 30 Skolkovo partners.
“But we are very optimistic about the opportunities that lie ahead. One thing that is fueling our optimism is that Skolkovo has now created the critical mass when it comes to pulling together all the interested parties to support a new entrepreneurial spirit,” Palladin added.
If any doubts remained about Skolkovo’s prospects as an international partner, they were blown to smithereens by this month’s addition of multinational electronics giant Panasonic.
The deal, signed in the presence of Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, commits Panasonic to building research facilities at Skolkovo. It will deploy at least 30 workers from its Russian representative office at the R&D center by 2017, an operation that will cost the company around 160 million rubles.
“This is a very important event for us,” said Vekselberg. “It proves that Skolkovo, which was designed as international project from the start, is advancing as it should.”
The signing ceremony was held at the Skolkovo Hypercube on the sidelines of a meeting of the Russian government’s modernization commission, chaired by Medvedev.
In September, Skolkovo resident EnSol announced it had entered a cooperation agreement with Panasonic to produce a new type of energy-saving battery for forklift trucks. EnSol manufactures lithium-ion batteries like those present in smartphones, a technology that, when adapted for warehouse vehicles, would allow the trucks to power up in 90 minutes rather than overnight.
Skolkovo’s two-dozen world-leading partners also include Boeing, Cisco Systems, EADS, GE, Johnson & Johnson, IBM, Intel, Siemens, Nokia and Samsung. Panasonic is Skolkovo’s 45th partner overall.
The international cooperation is set to continue well into 2015 as the Skolkovo Technopark launches its Soft Landing program geared towards foreign startups seeking access to the Russian market.
Skoltech, the innovations-based university that is a central component of the Skolkovo ecosystem, is a living example of global collaborations and their importance in developing economies.
It shows no signs of slowing its development, with a prominent US diplomat saying earlier this month that Skoltech’s partnership with Massachusetts Institute of Technology is more important now than ever.
"No country can go it alone in today’s globalized world, and a new measure of success may very well be the degree to which a country is able to cultivate cooperative relationships across many fields – business, scientific, educational, cultural – and with many countries,” said Jeffrey Sexton, minister counselor for public affairs at the US Embassy.
“The United States has benefitted immensely from these trends and will continue to foster them in all of our bilateral relationships, including our relationship with Russia,” Sexton added.
Russia may be about to break for its long January holidays, meanwhile, but Skolkovo has long been engaged in preparation for next year’s activities.
A map of the 2015 Russian Startup Tour. Photo: sk.ru
Applications are already being accepted for the 2015 Russian Startup Tour, an initiative led by the Skolkovo Foundation to promote entrepreneurship and encourage innovation in Russia’s regions.
It will venture beyond Russia’s borders for the first time next February as budding businesses in Belarus and Kazakhstan take part in the fifth annual innovative road show. The Russian cities along the tour include Moscow, St. Petersburg, Rostov-on-Don, Nizhny Novgorod, Kazan, Yekaterinburg, St. Petersburg, Vladivostok, Krasnoyarsk and Ufa.
In each city, local startups get the chance to pitch their products to the team, and those that give the most impressive presentations are invited to Moscow for summer’s Startup Village. Beside the Hypercube at the Skolkovo Innovation Center on June 2-3, the teams will face off in pitch sessions for the chance to win thousands of dollars’ worth of grants.
In tough economic times, the importance of that kind of support cannot be underestimated, Skolkovo officials have said.
But as Russia makes budget cuts in various spheres due to the current financial issues, Skolkovo’s own future appears set in stone.
“All the funds that were earmarked for Skolkovo and forming the innovation ecosystem in the country overall are there, no cuts have been made,” Deputy Prime Minister Arkady Dvorkovich said in November.
The Skolkovo Innovation Center has already attracted $2.5 billion in funding, and requires a similar amount for completion through 2020.
Various Skolkovo stakeholders have voiced confidence that the project is outside political crosshairs and will stand the test of time.
That sentiment was best summed up by Craig Barrett, the former Intel CEO who is now Skolkovo’s co-chairman.
“Let me reiterate that economics and politics moves much faster than research and innovation,” Barrett said by videoconference from the United States earlier this month.
“It’s important that we do everything we can to keep progress up on research and innovation that we’ve done in the past,” Barrett added. “From an international perspective we must work with governments not to put a limitation on scientific exchange,” Barrett said.
The sun sets over Skolkovo as a plane zips toward nearby Vnukovo Airport. Photo: sk.ru