Momentum has been building in emerging markets to diversify their economies by bolstering technological innovation and entrepreneurship. That is why Russia, aiming to diversify and grow the world's sixth-largest economy, is fostering innovation by replicating efforts made in Silicon Valley and other innovation hubs across the globe.
In Skolkovo -- a suburb of Moscow that is fast becoming Russia's new innograd, or innovation city -- the Russian government is sponsoring a $4 billion project to create a globally minded, adaptable system that attracts the best venture capitalists and entrepreneurs.
Silicon Valley's fierce, free-form competition ensures that the most innovative technologies triumph. This is why Russia is committed to open competition. Russia's innovation center developed an online system that allows entrepreneurs and startups to make competing bids for up to $10 million in grants. International experts have praised this online venture-bid system for its transparent and objective judging of entrepreneurs' competing bids. The innovation hub also provides an infrastructure to help entrepreneurs, including an intellectual property center that helps startups obtain and protect their patents.
Silicon Valley also is an international talent magnet. By encouraging multinationals to steer global talent to Russia, and by taking advantage of Russia's recently liberalized visa regime, the innograd too can become a global hub forinnovation and commerce. Several Fortune 100 companies, including Cisco, Intel, EMC and Microsoft, have committed to investing in Russia's innovation center. Similarly, Russia has amended 200 laws to encourage and streamline Skolkovo-bound investment.
As the flow of venture capital dollars along Sand Hill Road shows, Silicon Valley is at the forefront of investing in bold ideas and seeding incipient businesses. Embracing this model, the Russian government is committing $4 billion to support the innovation center's seed projects over the next two years. The developing tech hub is also partnering with Russian Venture Co. and Rusnano, venture capital institutions that recently funded successful startups such as BrightSource and Plastic Logic, respectively.
Silicon Valley showed the world that clusters -- an ecosystem of businesses, universities and public-private partnerships all drawing on deep reservoirs of human talent and financial capital -- are essential to the synergies that drive innovation. Russia is immense. Its huge population and extensive infrastructure allow businesses to scale quickly. But Russia is also thinking small by developing an innovation city that intersects education, businesses and infrastructure. The city features the Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology (which has partnered with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology), 355 startup technology companies and a "technopark" providing startups infrastructure and technological assets to commercialize their ideas and scale their businesses.
Source: MercuryNews.Com
The Skolkovo Foundation, RVC and Rusnano recently opened the Russian Innovation Center on Sand Hill Road, allowing Russia's institutions to learn from Silicon Valley -- and to invest in local California companies that are committed to the Russian market and its more than 143 million potential new customers.
Leaders from Skolkovo, various companies and many private venture funds are gathering Wednesday through Friday in Menlo Park for the Global Technology Symposium, a leading investment conference on entrepreneurship, growth companies and venture capital in emerging markets. The World Economic Forum in Davos may bring political and financial leaders together, but technology and innovation leaders are just as capable of changing our world for the better.
Washington, Moscow and other national capitals are the stars of our political universe, but increasingly it is the innovation capitals modeled after Silicon Valley -- such as Bangalore, Munich, Seoul, Tel Aviv and eventually Skolkovo -- that will pave the way for new economies all over the world.