According to Alexey Tolmachev, director of ITMO Venture Partners Fund, the government currently invests about 1.7% of the country’s budget in science. In comparison, Israel is investing about 4% of its national budget into science. While in Russia, direct investments into the industry is more common, in the West, endowment funds, business angels and venture capital funds are more popular. In the Arab world, the Sheikh’s are organising sovereign funds worth over several trillion dollars, comparable to Russia’s GDP. So the question of attracting investments into Russian science and developing small innovative enterprises at universities was a hot topic of discussion during the first day of the forum.
At this time, within a financial crisis, and with the falling demand for commodities, smart technologies are becoming the most dynamically developing segment of the market, explained Konstantin Okunev, the CEO of “ReksLeksNova”. However, he further shared that in Russia, there are practically no professional mediators for technology transfer, and there is a need for professional intermediaries and technology brokers, as institutions such as ITMO University are now emerging. Mr. Okunev stressed that to achieve this, European standards would need to be brought in to support innovation development in Russia.
There was some heated discussion in which ideas were shared that investors are not interested in investing money into science but rather those products that can make it the market as fast as possible. Alexey Semenov, Director of the St. Petersburg Business Angels Association explained that businesses have money but it’s very difficult to bring innovative R&D into the economic sector, and especially hard for startups. Businesses are interested in something that sells, so if startups come out of accelerators with something to sell, he explained, then there is a possibility that businesses would be interested in their innovation.
Sergei Khmelevsky, managing partner of ITMO Venture Partnership, touched on the theme of social and economic development. His thoughts led to the idea of extending this to all of Russia. He gave the example of the Innograd Science and Technology project, combining education, production and technology smart city.
“It will be a high-tech technopark, which will cover an area of about one hundred hectares, and will be aimed at applied research. We know, that ITMO University has campuses scattered across St. Petersburg, so it needs a new kind of infrastructure for conducting leading interdisciplinary research, which will be able to address all the challenges of this century. This implies close collaboration with industrial partners, and also collaboration with "University-production" becomes strategically important", – said the Mr. Khmelevsky.
At the end of the second day of the forum, joint business programs and endowment funds were discussed. Svetlana Lavrova, Executive Director of the EUSP Russian Endowment Fund, Adviser to Rector on Financial Issues, noted that the topic of discussion directly affects the link between business and universities.
"Endowment is the only thing that can help us think strategically for decades to come. All the great universities of the world are around due to the fact that they have a certain endowment support, which they can use so that entrepreneurs can interact with students, and undergraduates, and with postgraduate students and with the faculty. We have made a startling conclusion: when interactions with future endowment donors begins, you unexpectedly receive money that isn’t allocated to strategic goals but rather to a number of problems. In the first year, our department received money for developing certain fields that we did not plan on receiving money for. The long term purpose of endowments for supporting education is about helping an individual grow, and this daily, or minute-by-minute profits to the benefactor needs to give way to long-term effects which implies the growth of the corporation, individuals, and our society as a whole,” – explained Svetlana Lavrova
The third and final day of the forum will be focused on the communication strategies of the university. PR and science communicators from the strongest Russian universities came to St. Petersburg specifically for this purpose. The event will end with a presentation from the “People Need You” projects.
