Crowdfunding in Russian

The Ministry of Education and Science creates a "Russian Kickstarter" to finance R&D

Anatoly Alizar, "Giktimes"

There are still young and promising scientists in Russia, but the conditions for their work are not the best. There is not always enough money for financing. Officials do not really understand which research areas should be funded in the first place, and there is practically no infrastructure for venture investments. As a result, it is easier for young scientists, inventors and entrepreneurs to leave the country and launch a startup abroad, where they will attract venture investments and grants for their idea – and will be able to continue working.

The Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation offers a way out of the situation. The country should be saved by the platform of scientific and technological integration, planning and ordering of research (for simplicity, we will call it abbreviated - PNTIPZI).

As told Sergey Matveev, Deputy Director of the Department of Science and Technology of the Ministry of Education and Science, with the help of PNTIPZI, young scientists will find a potential investor for their project.

PNTIPZI will perform two functions:

• for research teams – search for a potential investor for the project;
• for business – the search for realized or potentially successful and interesting scientific developments.

It's very simple. In fact, in the state-owned Russian PNTIPZI system, a standard crowdfunding model is being implemented, which has proven its success on the example of Kickstarter and other crowdfunding platforms.

Officials believe that investments for Russian inventions will be found without difficulty. In their opinion, there are a lot of good inventions, investors just don't know about them: "In recent years, a system of accounting has been consistently built in Russia, which reflects the results of research and development carried out with the involvement of budget funds," said Sergey Matveev. – Today, the general database contains information about about 1.5 million R&D, tens of thousands of research results, including those protected by national and foreign patents."

One and a half million inventions have been registered, but cannot be implemented because investors simply do not know about them. The PNTIPZI service platform will solve this problem by establishing an exchange of information between investors and inventors.

As the official explained, to apply for financing through the PNTIPZI (that is, to put up your lot) any inventor can, if he has R&D results. According to him, similar digital platforms for managing scientific results and intellectual property are being created in the UK and Singapore, and in general, this is a general trend of development in the world.

It is enough for an investor to go to the catalog of inventions and choose a suitable candidate, with whom he will contact directly and conclude a contract.

It is not yet clear how the participation of private investors will be implemented in the system and whether it will be implemented at all. Evgeny Gavrilin, co-founder and CEO of the crowdfunding platform Boomstarter, said in a comment for the Izvestia newspaper that people's crowdfunding in Russia is difficult for objective reasons: "At the moment we are facing problems with the lack of Internet in some regions of the country and knowledge about crowdfunding in almost 95% of the population, only the remaining 5% are familiar with this concept".

According to the entrepreneur, the state should first support the dissemination of information among people about what crowdfunding is, and teach them how to use it, and only then create a single structure, a platform for launching projects, attracting investments.

But the state is firmly convinced that the appearance of the PNTIPZI will solve the problems with venture capital investment, financing of science and brain drain from Russia. Moreover, Russia will become an exporter, supplier of ideas and technologies for the whole world!

After the launch of the PNTIPZI in the Russian segment, it is planned to extend it to Western countries, the Ministry of Education and Science said. Gradually, the whole world will begin to finance Russian inventions. If the plan works, it is quite possible that foreign scientists and inventors will begin to move to Russia for permanent residence, to apply for patents here, when the country becomes a world leader in the field of scientific and technical developments!

Map of the global technological space

Unfortunately, the implementation of the Napoleonic plans of the government is still, to put it mildly, far away.

At the moment, Russian science and industry is on the periphery, and in recent years it has been increasingly shifting to the margins of the world economy. This is clearly visible on the map of the global technological space (2014), which displays the technological connectivity of various products.

Map of the global technological space

From right to left and from the periphery to the center, the complexity of the products gradually increases. There are several large clusters: light industry (green), mechanical engineering (blue), electronics (turquoise), chemistry and pharmaceuticals (purple), agriculture (yellow). The distance between the points reflects the ease of mastering one technology in the presence of another.

The economy naturally develops around existing technologies, gradually mastering neighboring spaces, experts explain. To master a new technology, it is necessary to contact an expert and accumulate sufficient personal experience in his presence. Therefore, on the scale of the economy, the main tools for mastering technologies are foreign direct investment, attracting qualified specialists, diasporas, training at foreign enterprises, etc.

According to the level of distribution of national nodes on the map of technological space, it is possible to calculate the level of complexity and connectivity of the national economy. The indicator indicates the prospects for growth in the future. For example, for the German economy, this indicator is equal to 1.922099 (the second in the world). Important note: the map is compiled based on data on the volume of national exports, the leaders are highly developed technological Japan and Germany, whose economy is significantly focused on the export of high–tech products.

Germany: 1,922099
2

By contrast, the level of complexity and connectivity of Cambodia's economy: -0.65. This country is dominated by low-tech exports (right side of the diagram) of light industry (green). The extreme imbalance of exports is reflected in the negative indicator of the connectivity and complexity of the technological space.

Cambodia: -0.6503248

Here are some other countries.

Poland: 0.9321474

Turkey: 0.420847

Russia: 0.0518671

Large spots are oil and gas. Scattered around the perimeter are lonely points – coal, metals, agriculture, weapons. The aviation industry, shipbuilding, nanoindustry and other "large" projects of recent years are difficult to distinguish with the naked eye. "Our capabilities are smeared on the periphery of the technological space, there are no competitive positions in the central nodes," says Marat Atnaliev, an independent analyst, former vice president of Evraz. – The position of the Russian economy in the technological space puts us in 98th place out of 121 in terms of medium-term economic growth prospects, with a forecast of less than 2% per year, that is, below the global average. And this is based on the data of 2014, that is, without taking into account the decline in oil prices and sanctions."

Obviously, the situation should be changed. Especially if Russia wants to become an "exporter, supplier of ideas and technologies for the whole world."

Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru  28.06.2016