In late April Skolkovo, the international tech hub under completion on the outskirts of Moscow, signed a cooperation agreement with Algeria’s National Agency for the Promotion and Development of Technoparks (ANPT). This partnership came as one of the results of a visit to Moscow by the Algerian prime minister and the ANPT’s director Abdelhakim Bensaoula.
As reported by the Skolkovo Foundation, Bensaoula met with project managers from the Russian tech hub’s IT and space clusters. Several types of cooperation are being considered between Skolkovo and the ANPT, which operates four technoparks around Algeria, including one covering 100 hectares in the capital Algiers.
The director of the ANPT, which aims to foster the development of small and medium-size companies, as well as provide a landing ground for multinational ICT firms, said his aim in coming to Skolkovo was to establish a link and look at ways to interact and take part in each other’s events.
“When we are from different parts of the world, we have different ways of thinking about a problem and finding a solution, so we would like through our partnerships to invite startups to come and mix with our startups and share their ways of thinking so they can come up with more innovative solutions,” Bensaoula told representatives of the Skolkovo clusters.
Dr. Anna Nikina, head of international projects at the Skolkovo Foundation, invited Bensaoula to attend the International Association of Science Parks (IASP) World Conference being held in Moscow in September, of which Skolkovo is one of the hosts.
Bensaoula said he had had a very productive visit to Moscow, reported the Skolkovo Foundation.
“Skolkovo is an amazing project,” he said, adding that he hoped to return and see it when the tech hub is complete.
Similar approaches from Sahara to Siberia
While Skolkovo divides its activities into five clusters (IT, space, biomedicine, energy and nuclear), the ANPT, founded in 2004, focuses its technoparks around ICT – but as it applies to all fields, including agriculture, energy conservation, traffic control and other spheres, said Bensaoula.
In ideology and approach, however, the state innovations programmes of Russia and Algeria are very similar, he said.
“That’s the first thing that attracted me to Skolkovo,” he said. “It’s exactly the same approach we are adopting in Algeria – a smart city oriented towards technology, towards an economy of knowledge.”
Bensaoula also drew parallels in the difficulties both countries have to overcome to modernize their economies. In Russia, decades of Communist rule under which private enterprise was illegal have created a society in which entrepreneurship is still sometimes seen as something dangerous and undesirable.
“We have the same challenges in a way, because we’ve also had a mostly socialist economy,” said Bensaoula. “So we’re not trained to accept risk or failure, and being an entrepreneur is to accept risk and also learn from failure.
“We’re trying to teach our youngsters now to say that it’s OK to take a risk,” he said. “We share the same economic history, and we’re trying to move into the next century the right way.”
A variety of international partnerships
Since project start in 2010, Skolkovo has worked hard to attract international partners. Among the partnerships signed recently was an investment agreement with the major Chinese foundation Cybernaut Investment Group. On their side, German micro-optics and laser producer LIMO and Japan’s industrial robot-maker FANUC opened R&D centers in the Russian tech hub.
Over the past year, technological and business ties have been developed recently with Argentina, Cuba, Ethiopia, France, India, Singapore, South Korea and several other countries.
Source: Skolkovo Foundation
