Dr. Alina Ilinova, an assistant professor and the tech transfer manager at Mining University in St. Petersburg, spent quality time earlier this year at the Maryland International Incubator (MI2, University of Maryland, College Park), studying the best international practices in the commercialization of university-originating technologies and the innovation ecosystems developed at UMD and other American universities.
The painstaking work has culminated in a comprehensive report, in which Ms. Ilinova compares the commercialization practices in the U.S. and Russia, pinpoints the weak spots that Russia still has in this process, and joins her US-based colleagues in offering Russian universities a set of recommendations on how to fine-tune these efforts.
Here are key excerpts from this report:
”In Russia, technology commercialization struggles for several reasons.
“Through recent policy initiatives, coupled with investment in physical infrastructure, Russia has built the components of an innovation ecosystem. But it lacks many things that would encourage technology commercialization such as an entrepreneurial culture and innovative environment, strong project teams and skilled inventors in business, and entrepreneurship education.
“What is more, as we have learned from our own experience and from conversations with colleagues, in Russia the state and the universities are highly centralized, intellectual property is poorly protected and the patent process is a mere formality with little or no standards, and there is an excessive concentration on formal procedures, on filling out statistical reports and observing indicators, etc.
“As a result, Russia has yet to find a way to consistently convert the knowledge and technologies developed by its universities into saleable products.”
This paper was made possible by a grant from IREX (the International Research & Exchanges Board) with funds provided by the US-Russia Foundation for Economic Advancement and the Rule of Law (USRF). It came as a result of Ms. Ilinova’s participation in the Yegor Gaidar Fellowship Program in Economics. Dr. Kai Duh, the director of the University of Maryland—China Joint Research Park, provided valuable support as advisor.
You may read the report in full by clicking here.
