As the International Association of Science Parks and Areas of Innovation (IASP) conference got underway at Skolkovo on Monday, representatives of innovation centres from around the world exchanged visions and experiences of how to create a successful innovation city.
The IASP conference opened at Skolkovo on Monday with delegates from more than 60 countries present. Photo: Sk.ru.
Russia is not the first country to set up an innovations centre with the aim of creating a national economy based on knowledge instead of the export of natural resources.
In 2006 - four years before the Skolkovo project was launched - the United Arab Emirates founded its own innovation centre, Masdar City, in Abu Dhabi in order to transform the UAE’s oil and gas-focused economy via “a greenprint for sustainable development,” according to the project’s planning and delivery director, Anthony Mallows.
“There are many parallels between Skolkovo and Masdar City,” Mallows told the conference on Monday.
“Skolkovo has more advantages because Moscow is a phenomenal research centre,” he conceded, but just as Skolkovo has the Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology, Masdar has founded its own research university - the Masdar Institute of Science and Technology.
“Research and education is fundamental to the city of the future,” he said.
Like Skolkovo, Masdar is an emphatically outward-looking city, and builds wind and solar power plants all over the world, including in the U.K., where it built the London Array – an offshore wind farm in the Thames Estuary.
“Masdar is in fact an ecosystem of corporate entities looking to where the future lies, with knowledge, innovation and technology,” said Mallows.
The project has two investment funds worth more than $540 million that is invested exclusively overseas, and recently, the UAE and Russia announced a $10 billion investment fund.
“We are small, we need to partner,” said Mallows.
It is planned that 50,000 people will live and work at the 600-hectare Masdar City, which is still under construction. As a result of its innovative building plan to include a lot of courtyards and shady, short streets that maximise the breeze passing through them, the innovation city is 10-15 degrees cooler than the surrounding parts of Abu Dhabi, where temperatures can exceed 40 degrees Celsius.
“I think we have got most of the ingredients right,” said Mallows.
Anthony Mallows, planning and delivery director of Masdar City in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. Photo: Sk.ru.
The Sophia Antipolis science park in Nice, France, was founded by a French senator under very different conditions 40 years ago. One of the co-founders of IASP in 1984, the science park now generates 100 million euros every year in turnover.
The first piece of advice offered by the Sophia Antipolis Foundation’s head, Dominique Fache, was: be patient. “Things change – when we started the project there was no internet,” he said.
Although many of the science parks present at the conference have government support, Fache believes there is a contradiction between the word "innovation" and government.
“We force politicians to think of the future, while they prefer to spend on today,” he said.
“Sometimes people ask, do you need to specialise on one area? I don’t think so: often the most interesting things are those that overlap several different areas,” he said.
Fache believes that the criterion for success is the creation of a new culture. “This is the challenge,” he told the conference.
The Frenchman, who has lived in Russia for 20 years and speaks fluent Russian, said his adopted country should focus on developing its regions.
Against the backdrop of Russia’s strained relations with the West and mutual sanctions, Fache, who is also chairman of the board of the France-based Russian Technology Foundation, offered some food for thought.
“There can’t be any sanctions on innovative technologies that haven’t been invented yet,” he said.
Dominique Fache, director of France's Sophia Antipolis Foundation. Photo: Sk.ru.
While most of the innovation centres represented at the conference were established by the state, Technopolis GS, located in the small town of Gusev in Russia’s westernmost Kaliningrad region, is the result of a very different story. It was set up in 2007 by the St. Petersburg-based private investment and industry holding company GS Group.
“There is no state participation, which is very strange for these projects,” said Konstantin Aksenov, vice president for strategic development at GS Group.
“Instead of building innovations from scratch that might then enter the market, we took the opposite approach: the market was waiting, and we made a list of what was needed, primarily microelectronics and nanoelectronics,” he said, adding that Russia still only has one factory mass producing microchips: the factory set up by GS.
The company also makes everything it possibly can in Russia, he added, to a smattering of applause.
Technopolis GS has attracted more than 6 billion rubles ($93 million at current exchange rates) in investment, and work on the project is still ongoing, said Aksenov.
It is home to six different production facilities working in various spheres, including one set up by an outside company at its own initiative that is now selling to China, he said.
In Aksenov's opinion, the necessary ingredient for a successful innovations centre is what he termed “creative bouillon.”
“We’re not just building a city, we’re building a creative space,” he said.
Konstantin Aksenov, vice president of GS Group. Photo: Sk.ru.
Daniel Gonzalez Bootello, director general of the Andalusia Smart City project, which aims to create a knowledge-based economy in the southern Spanish region in place of a rural and tourism-based economy, said there was no universal solution to creating a successful innovation city.
“Is there a secret recipe and something that always works? My personal opinion is that it cannot be reduced to this abstraction,” he told the conference. “You need first to put the right ingredients in place, but after that, you let them be. If the ingredients are correct, they will flourish. It’s more a case of allowing rather than pushing,” he said.
“Pushing will create some jobs initially but it will not be sustainable because it is artificial. They [the different elements of the innovations ecosystem] need to interact among themselves and flourish.”
Under the Andalusia Smart City project, a cluster has been created of 167 members, ranging from large companies including state utilities to small and medium-sized enterprises, including startups, as well as cities and universities across the region. The aim is to provide these different elements of the ecosystem with a space in which to interact, resulting in the creation of cities that are efficient, sustainable, comfortable, innovative and attractive.
“People need to be confident that their ideas aren’t going to be stolen, that the state isn’t going to rip up their benefits,” said Bootello.
“If people know they will find people to help them grow their business, that’s the most important spur for innovation. Of course people have to want to live there [in an innovation city], they have to be able to move around, have fun once they leave the office, and of course have good quality of life.
“There are many factors, but I think this [confidence] is the most important one.”