Mail.ru Group, a large, publicly traded Internet group has launched its own internal incubator to develop projects initiated by employees. Mail.ru Group entrepreneurs will develop their projects in full autonomy while retaining their employee status.
“We will try to infuse the incubator with a true startup spirit, offering dedicated work spaces separate from the group’s offices,” Mail.ru Group press service explained to East-West Digital News.
The first project to pass through the incubator is Futubra, a Twitter analog that Mail.ru Group intends to launch in January. The group is considering channeling the launch all of its new services through the same incubator process.
Projects hatched thought the in-house incubator will not always benefit, however, from traffic redirected from the group’s existing web properties, Russian business daily Vedomosti reported. The idea is to have new projects develop in ‘natural’ conditions to guarantee their competitiveness and sustainability.
Incubators have sprung up like mushrooms on the Moscow startup scene over the past few years. Pioneering the movement were students from the Moscow Higher School of Economics, who launched HSE Inc. in 2006, followed by the Presidential Academy of National Economics and Public Administration and Moscow State University, with student incubators founded in 2010 and 2011 respectively.
Fast Lane Ventures, the in-house Internet incubator of Direct Group, a Western style investment company, was launched in mid-2010. Farminers, which has positioned itself as a startup academy, and TexDrive, an international accelerator, were among this year’s most notable private initiatives.
