Yesterday Hyundai Motor Russia & CIS announced a new partnership with Skolkovo, the innovation hub under completion on the outskirts of Moscow. Under this partnership, a new startup, ‘Hyundai Mobility Lab,’ will develop IT solutions and new services to address the growing demand for mobility services.
“A new trends is emerging in today’s Russian automobile market, a new approach to using cars. The new generation doesn’t want to own a car, but to share it. To follow this trend from ownership to sharing, Hyundai is broadening its sphere of activity: it aims to offer not just cars, but a whole range of services as well as the freedom of comfortable and safe driving,” the company states.
Hyundai Mobility Lab is defined as “a new IT-platform dedicated to such smart mobility services.” The key goal of the project is to develop an application to use Hyundai’s subscription service: “A customer will be able to rent a Hyundai car online for a period of time and to get a range of complementary services. Any one, not only Hyundai car owners, will be able to use the services provided by Hyundai Mobility. People can subscribe online.”
Hyundai Mobility Lab is expected to start activities in the second half of this year.
Several other R&D partnerships were announced during Skolkovo’s main yearly, ‘Startup Village,‘ which is taking place these days. Skolkovo will support a startup accelerator jointly with France’s Orange Business Services, as well as a polymer transformation research center with Sibur, a major Russian petrochemicals company.
More than 50 Russian and foreign industrial partners in total have opened an R&D center so far in the innovation hub, claims Skolkovo.