Under support of South Ural State University, “Boiling Point” (“Tochka Kipeniya”) Co-working Center of the Agency for Strategic initiatives (ASI) is to be opened in the region in the nearest future. Chelyabinsk region will become the sixth platform in Russia where such new format of work will be launched, allowing to create a space for discussing innovative projects. Deputy Head of the university’s Department of Scientific and Innovative Affairs, Evgeniy Iogolevich, told us about what else is included in the SUSU’s innovation belt, and about plans for the Technology Park’s development.
Technology Park is an innovative environment. The first technology park originated at the USA’s Stanford University in 1940s. The university started renting out its grounds to high-tech companies which allowed solving the problem of the university’s financing, lack of highly-qualified specialists, and provided its graduates with job positions. Implementation of this idea at the territory of Stanford University became the beginning of the well-known Silicon Valley. In Russia, first technology parks started being created in 1990s.
– Evgeniy Vladimirovich, during their last visit to SUSU specialists of the QS (Quacquarelli Symonds) International Consulting Company, which annually publishes the most credible rankings of the world’s best universities, highly estimated potential of the SUSU’s Technology Park by calling it one of the best in Russia. Why?
– If we are to talk about SUSU’s innovation belt (Technology Park), nowadays we managed to implement a series of important steps. We created the Youth Business Incubator which unites hundreds of our students, postgrads and young researchers, who can now not only conduct scientific research but also commercialize scientific inventions, within the frameworks of which we attract for cooperation the Innovation Promotion Fund, the Agency for Strategic Initiatives, the Russian Venture Company, the Skolkovo Innovation Center, etc. The SUSU Council of Young Scientists is also actively working in the innovative sphere, and the university’s services help creating new innovative enterprises, perform technology transfer, acceleration projects, and provide support to scientific teams while submitting applications for various scientific contests and grants; they are the Patent Department, the Department of Science and Innovation, the Center for Innovation Consulting, and others. Small innovative enterprises (SIE) form a powerful foundation of the Technology Park together with more than 40 university’s research and education centers and laboratories.
– What is the role of small innovative enterprises (SIE) as part of SUSU’s Technology Park?
– As of today, 68 small innovative enterprises have been created at the university. SIEs are differed by two types: the first one is initiative enterprises which come to us with completed innovative business projects; they need technological support and human resources. The second type of the enterprises is youth start-ups created by our students and postgrads, who transfer from scientific researchers into the category of technology entrepreneurs aspiring to commercialize their inventions. Today more the 300 university’s students, postgrads and young researchers are working in such SIEs. Innovative decisions of SUSU’s small innovative enterprises and development of entrepreneurial ecosystem encourage SUSU employees and graduates to open enterprises in the spheres which are the most perspective for creating job positions for highly qualified personnel; these spheres are: IT sector, engineering, telecommunications and media; all of this leads to diversification of regional economy.
– In what industries do SUSU’s innovative enterprises operate?
– Our small innovative enterprises, many of which are created by winners of the UMNIK program of the Innovation Promotion Fund, solve wide range of problems. In education sphere: from development of interactive sandpit tables (equipment for developing artistic abilities of children who are 3-8 years old) which are selling not only in the Chelyabinsk region, to provision of educational equipment for the WorldSkills Russia National Championship. In the sphere of information and telecommunication technologies one of our SIEs took part in creating graphics for such cartoons as Buba and Nikita Kozhemyaka, and such movies as Ekipazh (Flight Crew), Ledokol (Icebreaker) and Prityazhenie (Attraction), and a Sony Pictures film, Final Fantasy; another small innovative enterprise successfully develops systems for online monitoring of cultivation areas’ state, which determine location and fuel consumption of agricultural machinery. In medicine: from development of program-apparatus complex for non-contact EKG registration to creation of domestic insulin pump. In industry: for example, our SIEs perform small volume manufacturing of one-drive lock shield ball valves with dual gate, first samples of which are exploited at a series of objects: for example, in the Vysota-239 unit of the ChTPZ PAO and in automated individual heat supply stations as shut-off-and-regulating elements.
– What are plans for development of SUSU’s Technology Park?
– In the nearest future it is planned to launch SUSU’s Industrial Consulting Council which will include executives of partner-enterprises: Chelyabinsk Compressor Plant, Chelyabinsk Tractor Plant – URALTRAC, Magnitogorsk Metallurgical Plant, Zavod Plastmass, KONAR and others. The objective of the Industrial Consulting Council will be assessing prospective of science-and-innovation projects and assistance in their implementation. It is planned that the Council will provide a feedback to scientific projects and organize foresight sessions for determining prospective directions. Moreover, two more types of small innovative enterprises, on which the university will rely during implementation of the Road map strategy, will appear at SUSU: enterprises for markets of the National Technology Initiative and enterprises with large industrial partners of the country and the world (KAMAZ, Emerson, SMS group, etc.).
Another one of the nearest goals is creating of the “Boiling Point” – a space in which initiators and leaders of projects in the sphere of innovations, new markets and technology meet and develop; a space of interaction of the regional intellectual resource and, as a consequence, formation of the future region’s economy. Target audience of the “Boiling Point” is the active part of the society: technological and social entrepreneurs, young scientists and engineers, representatives of small and medium businesses, innovators and students, teachers and school students.
– What is the end goal of the SUSU Technology Park’s operation?
– We are forming an innovation belt of the university as an integral system for sustainable introduction of intellectual activity results obtained at the university, enhancing attractiveness of scientific and engineering activity and technological entrepreneurship among young people and involvement of wide ranges of population into implementation of the National Technology Initiative.