Next week a group of select innovation experts, venture capitalists and representatives of large corporations will start a three-month-long road show through 26 Russian cities – from St. Petersburg, to Astrakhan on the shores of the Caspian Sea, to Tomsk and Yakutsk in Siberia, to Vladivostok in the Far East – aiming to meet thousands of local startup entrepreneurs, innovators, and representatives of technoparks.
In each city, the program consists of presentations, master classes and seminars, all in a bid to raise local innovators’ knowledge of international and domestic best practice as well as to improve their ability to develop projects and companies.
According to the organizers, more than 200 hundred innovative projects will be presented in the fields of information technologies, space technologies and telecommunications, energy efficient technologies, new materials, nuclear technologies and biomedical technologies.
There will be “minimum bureaucracy, minimum boringness, maximum energy,” pledged Pekka A. Viljakainen, Chairman of the organizing committee, in a video announcement.
The road show involves key government bodies, illustrating the Russian state’s efforts to stimulate innovation activity in the country. Among these bodies are the Skolkovo Foundation, which is completing a giant tech hub project on the outskirts of Moscow, the fund of funds RVC, and the state-owned nanotech corporation Rusnano. Also partnering with the tour are the Youth State Agency (‘Rosmolodezh’), the Agency for Strategic Initiatives (ASI), President Putin’s brainchild, and several federal ministries.
The first edition of the Russian Startup Tour took place in the spring of last year in 15 cities.
