Four years ago, the government allocated over 2 billion euros to develop a STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths) hub for students. One of the key goals is to connect science and business, so that STEM subjects become more relevant to real life and more helpful to the economy.technology.
The Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology (Skoltech) is due to be officially opened later this year in September.But students are already enrolling in the pilot programme. Oleg Alekseev, vice-president of the program, is optimistic about the future: "I don't think its obvious today for most people. But If you want to control markets and have a good quality economy, you have to control technologies. In order to have a successful innovation centre you need a technology university at its core."The Skoltech campus will host 1,200 post-graduate students. The concept is based on the experiences of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, among others.Ilya Dubinsky, the director at the Skoltech Centre for Entrepreneurship & Innovation said: "It is almost impossible to develop the idea right through to its social impact if you are working alone. You need to work with other people who can deal with aspects you cannot. You need to find investors and talk to them in their own languages. You need to find engineers from other spheres. You need to find sales managers. Other countries are in a better position compared to us. They already have this ecosystem. We have to create this business environment from scratch."