A unique model for Russian innovation

Despite being just eight years old, the Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology receives ‘unparalleled’ support for funding.

If you can imagine a Silicon Valley in Russia, then the Skolkovo community comes pretty close, offering a breeding ground for innovation and investment in new technologies, and a hotbed of entrepreneurial activity. The Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology (Skoltech) is its “academic brain” – a new university founded in 2011 with the vision of becoming a world-leading academic institute. 

The recruitment of faculty and postdoctoral researchers is an ongoing process at Skoltech, as its research and education programmes continue to grow. Faculty members are extensively involved in attracting external funds in the form of research grants and industry projects.

“We decided to create a unique model that brought research into a number of selected, cutting-edge domains, concentrating on use-inspired outcomes that focus on innovation,” explains its provost, Keith Stevenson.

Ensuring that research and education can translate into useful innovations that can be applied in wider society is at the core of the university’s mission, and this is reflected in its wider partnerships with industry and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which was its founding partner. The university’s areas of focus consider critical challenges in fields such as biomedicine, space, energy and IT, and the emergence of more than 40 start-ups from the university in the short time since it was established is helping Russia to diversify its technology base away from oil and gas. 

Developing entrepreneurial skills is at the heart of the Skoltech curriculum, with students at all levels getting the chance to experience a month-long “immersion” into innovation through workshops and courses that teach them how to identify ideas.

Professor Stevenson adds: “This is a skill they don’t always have – it gets them out of the normal way of thinking. We believe this is the only programme of its type in the world.” Encouraging learners to approach problems differently is all part of the experience. “Their response might be ‘I don’t know where to start’, [but] rather than telling them where to start, we get them to engage and participate, even if they don’t have the skills. This means they come up with more creative solutions.”

It is a system that gets results and creates a locus of activity. Skoltech’s first start-up, the robotics company Wicron, was established in 2013, and 40 of the 74 companies to come out of Skoltech so far are also Skolkovo residents. 

To ensure that the best ideas can be translated into businesses or applied research, there are numerous mechanisms in place.

The Centre for Entrepreneurship and Innovation, for example, each year invites pitches from students who compete for basic start-up funding. After that, they can go through an 18-month programme that helps them to build business plans, develop sales pitches and other activities that will enable them to secure further venture capital funding in the future. Professor Stevenson argues that Skoltech students and graduates have access to “unparalleled” support for attracting funding in Russia. Other university students often have to fund their own intellectual property and patent registration, but Skoltech students receive extensive financial support and networking opportunities with successful business leaders from the Skolkovo community and beyond. One area of focus is digital agriculture, supporting innovations in, for example, crop simulation or managing farms remotely. Skoltech’s Center for Computational and Data-Intensive Science and Engineering has also built and operates one of the most powerful supercomputers in Russia, Zhores.

Skoltech’s close ties with MIT are going from strength to strength, and the partnership is now beginning its third phase. MIT played a vital role in establishing Skoltech in the earliest phase, and the second phase focused on building best practice for carrying out use-focused research.

The partnership now works on a more “peer-to-peer” basis, according to Professor Stevenson. “It has become a means of supporting groundbreaking ideas that we could not access elsewhere. We operate on an equal level with a focus on joint collaboration.” The statistics about the joint research between MIT and Skoltech demonstrate the practical relevance of their collaboration: between 2014 and 2019, Skoltech published more than 118 joint pieces of research with MIT.  

Skoltech also has a partnership with Germany’s Technical University of Munich, known for its strength in engineering, and is building relationships with other institutions in Europe and Saudi Arabia. And it continues to hold its own as a standalone university. In field-weighted citations, Skoltech has a score of 1.6 compared to the global average of 1.0. Reflecting this, the Nature Index ranking included Skoltech in its top 100 young universities index in 2019. 

Academic collaborations are only one strand of Skoltech’s outreach. Its more than 155 research and development projects include Bayer AG, Topcorn, Philips and Sberbank, with 6 per cent of published research at the university undertaken with corporate sponsorship.

“One of the reasons Skoltech was founded was to promote and access collaborations with industry,” says Professor Stevenson. “The Industrial Liaison Office at the university helps to identify faculties and research teams that could come up with solutions to industry problems and, in 2019, Skoltech attracted 1,595 million roubles (£17 million) in funding for industrial projects.”

One area of focus is digital agriculture, supporting innovations in, for example, crop simulation or managing farms remotely. Skoltech’s Center for Computational and Data-Intensive Science and Engineering houses Russia’s biggest data-processing centre, a joint project with Sberbank.

Like any academic institution designed to produce research that solves real-world problems, an interdisciplinary approach is key. This will only become more important as Skoltech continues to grow, believes Professor Stevenson, citing big data, optimisation and prediction, and the burgeoning digital economy as likely areas of focus. Teaching students to think laterally helps them when working with these “big, complex problems”, he adds. “This is the most important part of how we build the next generation of scientists and engineers.”

One growth area will be space services and space systems research. Skoltech is inviting students enrolled in any discipline to consider how they could apply their research to these areas, with a view to creating successful start-up companies and attracting investment. With its reputation for nurturing entrepreneurs blooming around the world, moving into space could take Skoltech even further. 

To see the opportunities available at Skoltech, please click here.