Annual Startup Village international conference (https://startupvillage.ru/en/) is taking place at the Skolkovo Innovation Center on May 29–30. This year, the event will become a platform for a business dialogue not between investors and startups only, but between Russian innovation suppliers and prominent foreign customers as well.
Five industry discussions with participation of large international companies will help Skolkovo residents and transnational corporations to understand each other better. Russian technology suppliers will learn which solutions are more sought after on the markets of Europe and Asia, and how customers’ requirements to implanting technologies into corporate environments differ depending on a region. Another important subject of discussion is how a new technology owner assesses the deal’s business results (efficiency of a new cancer cure or benefits of an AI’s analysis of manufacturing challenges).
At workshops, large corporations such as AstraZeneca, Huawei, Honeywell, and PEMANDU Rus LLC will explain Russian companies the ways to simplify development of competitive products to be in most demand by government or business customers.
Presentations by accelerator companies will assist large European, American and Asian businesses in properly formulating their technology requirements. The list of the speakers may be found at https://startupvillage.ru/en/speakers.
According to Kirill Kaem, Senior Vice President for Innovation at the Skolkovo Foundation, “Large corporations such as AstraZeneca, Bayer, and Unilever are now even more interested in new developments than a year ago. The difference is that the mutual efforts of the Foundation and the major market players have significantly accelerated the development of Russian startups, bringing supply and demand closer together to the maximum. During the year of work in the new paradigm, the international customer and the supplier of breakthrough technologies achieved better understanding. An even more attentive evaluation of startups from the viewpoint of demand by large foreign businesses also helped. Startup Village will provide the startups with valuable expertise from the best international mentors and business angels. Today this is something they really need.”
The Skolkovo Foundation is a non-profit organization created on the initiative of the President of the Russian Federation in September 2010. The purpose of the Foundation is to create an ecosystem that is friendly to developing entrepreneurship and research in the following areas: energy efficiency and energy saving, nuclear, space, biomedical, strategic computer technologies and software. The Foundation has been entrusted with the management functions of the Skolkovo Innovation Center, which activities are regulated by a special law that provides special economic conditions to startups that have passed a special external technological expert assessment test (today, there are more than 1,800 of them).