Two of Russia’s key development institutions, the Skolkovo Foundation and Russian Venture Company (RVC), will combine their efforts next year to organize the Open Innovations Startup Tour (OIST), a roving quest to find and support talented startups in the Russian regions – and beyond.
Renat Batyrov, director of the Skolkovo Technopark. Photo: Sk.ru.
Both state institutions have previously held their own roadshows in the regions with the aim of encouraging tech entrepreneurship across the country, but will now work to coordinate their activities, representatives of Skolkovo and RVC announced Wednesday at the Open Innovations forum being held at the newly opened Skolkovo Technopark. RVC’s prestigious accelerator programme, GenerationS, will now be integrated with the Skolkovo Foundation’s Startup Tour, and the OIST will also incorporate the programmes of Rusnano and the Foundation for Assistance to Small Innovative Enterprises in Science and Technology.
Startup projects will first be selected during the OIST, and will then be presented at Skolkovo's annual summer Startup Village, said Renat Batyrov, director of the Skolkovo Technopark. Then they will take part in joint business accelerator programmes, before being introduced to investors and corporations at next year’s Open Innovations forum, he added.
Gulnara Bikkulova, deputy head of RVC, said that there had previously been a lot of development programmes in the regions, and that the aim of coordinating the activities of RBC and Skolkovo was to make those programmes more efficient.
Deputy Prime Minister Arkady Dvorkovich said earlier this year that the government was looking at ways to improve the efficiency of Russia’s innovations institutions and to ensure that they streamlined their work.
Work in the regions will not stop after the roadshow, but will continue during the course of the year, said Bikkulova.
In previous years, Skolkovo’s Startup Tour went to about a dozen Russian cities, as well as, in recent years, the Belarusian capital Minsk and Kazakh city of Almaty. In 2017, the OIST will set its sights much further afield, taking in not only previously unvisited Russian cities such as St. Petersburg and Barnaul, but also the capital cities of Kyrgyzstan, Azerbaijan and Armenia. For the first time, there will be an Asian lap of the roadshow, visiting India, China, Indonesia, Vietnam, Taiwan, Korea, Japan and Malaysia.