The Russian Startup Tour is the country’s biggest project to find and nurture fledgling companies with potentially game-changing innovations. The tour runs from February through April and takes in all of Russia’s major population centers. Enterprises from surrounding provinces travel to regional hubs to take part, leaving few corners of this vast country untapped.
The goal is to develop regional startup communities by giving all stakeholders – from startups to investors and research institutes – the tools they need to commercialize their ideas.
The 2015 Russian Startup Tour, the third annual traveling business, begins in the southern center of the Russian Federation, Rostov-on-Don on February 3, the first stop on a 12-city tour of Russia and, for the first time, Belarus and Kazakhstan.
“The Startup Tour is a forum that allows you to air your ideas”, said Skolkovo president Viktor Vekselberg, opening the event along with Rostov Governor Vasily Golubev in the presence of hundreds of entrepreneurs and other guests. “In Skolkovo we have created an entire system that can help you to realize your potential. We want you to have the confidence that if you have an idea, this idea will find support in us, and we will do our best to try to make it happen”.
As in previous years, the program is split into two parts: the training and the pitch competition. We’ve doubled the length of each stop to two days, which frees up time for seminars, master-classes and networking.
Day one is devoted to the training side, with master-classes for young innovators, while day two sees the pitch sessions, where fledgling companies present their products and services on stage and are judged by a panel of experts.
Invited to take part in the pitch competition are startups and projects at any stage of development: from abstract idea to finished prototype; from a legally registered company to a group of friends; from a bunch of classmates to individual scientists, entrepreneurs or researchers.
3-4 Rostov-on-Don
11-12 Tomsk
17-18 Nizhny Novgorod