Skolkovo Innovation Award: six finalists
Six projects became finalists of the Skolkovo Innovation Award competition
RIA News
Six of the 23 ideas that made it to the semifinals made it to the final of the first Skolkovo Innovation Award in Russia, held with the support of Cisco I-Prize, according to the blog of the organizers of the contest on Friday.
The list of ideas whose authors will compete for prizes includes such projects as "Intelligent cloud platform for searching audio and video materials" from Roman Medvedev, a resident of Naberezhnye Chelny, "Software for contactless control of equipment using human pupils "Eye"" from the Novilab team from Moscow, "Portable a device for identification and non-destructive testing in real time" from the InViewLAB team from the city of Dolgoprudny and three more projects from teams from St. Petersburg and Moscow.
"We are impressed by the high quality of the ideas and the high level of the contest participants. This was also noted by other persons who, as a result, want to establish contacts with the participants of our competition," Christopher Thompson, curator of global incubation projects at Cisco, which is the sponsor of the competition, wrote in a blog.
The competition is held in three stages. In the first round (held from November 2010 to mid-February), participants had to register on the contest website and add their idea. 23 of them, selected by the site visitors and the competition commission, moved on to the semi-final round, the results of which were announced on Friday. The names of the winners will be announced in May.
The ideas of the semifinalists were evaluated by 10 judges. Among them were several representatives of Skolkovo, in particular, Sergey Shubin, Director for the development of IT projects of the information Technology cluster of the Skolkovo Development Center for the Development and Commercialization of New Technologies, as well as his colleagues from other clusters: Roman Bolgarin (cluster of biological and medical technologies) and Ilya Dubinsky (cluster of energy-efficient technologies). In addition, the ideas of the participants were evaluated by the head of LiveJournal Russia Svetlana Ivannikova, partner of the Almaz Capital Partners venture fund Pavel Bogdanov, as well as several representatives of Cisco itself and other competent specialists.
Christopher Thompson said that, among other things, the judges wanted to see a clear definition of the target market, real ways to enter it and evidence of the viability of the ideas presented. Those participants who were able to adequately highlight these aspects of their developments received higher scores.
Now each of the teams must send one representative to participate in the final, which will be held by the Skolkovo Foundation on Monday, May 16, 2011 in Moscow. Representatives of the teams will have to show a detailed presentation of their project and convince the judging panel of its prospects. The winner of the contest will receive 3 million rubles; the runner–up – 1.5 million rubles; the third - 750 thousand rubles. In addition, the finalists will have a chance to become residents of the Skolkovo Innovation Center.
This does not mean that the winners of the competition will automatically move to Skolkovo, however, according to Cisco representatives, the company will at least offer training at the Cisco Entrepreneurship Institute under a special program to the semi-finalists of the competition. Its goal is to teach the authors of ideas how to grow a business out of them and help them bring their projects to a level where they will have a good chance of becoming residents of Skolkovo.
Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru01.04.2011