Skoltech president Alexander Kuleshov: “Transferring the MIT model onto Russian soil may not have been the right thing to do”

Alexander Kuleshov, the new president of the Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology (Skoltech), officially took over from the four-year-old research university’s founding president, U.S. professor Edward Crawley, last month. In an interview with Mikhail Baklanov, chief editor of Sk.ru, Kuleshov – an expert in IT and mathematical modelling who has served on Skoltech’s board since it was founded – spoke openly about the degradation of the Russian education system, the difficulty of applying the U.S. model in Russia, and the secret of creating innovations.