Medvedev premieres Skolkovo innovations city on international road show

Fortunately, Medvedev, himself an advanced user of all sorts of fashionable IT-gadgets, has lots of good news to tell the ‘high-tech geniuses.’ These include the bill of a special Skolkovo Law, which envisages, amongst others, the creation of privileged conditions, including special tax and customs regimes, to stimulate high-tech companies towards development and active commercialization of their ideas and end products in the center. Besides, 15bln rubles have already been disbursed for the town’s social and business infrastructure developments. These and other policy measures are to attract leading local and foreign high-tech companies to the Russian citadel of IT innovations. 

Medvedev’s audience comprised leading politicians, notably, Arnold Schwarzenegger, the governor of California, the state housing the Silicon Valley, who generously praised the president’s initiatives to create an analog of the U.S. Silicon Valley in Russia, and also key investors and CEOs of companies that are trendsetters on the global innovative technologies markets. Specifically, the president met with the heads of Twitter, Apple, Cisco Systems and other IT CEOs and experts, including Soviet and Russian emigres, and called on them to share their visions with him on how best to realize the Skolkovo project. He drove this point home by specially noting that Russia is ready to maximally take as much progressive ideas and managerial expertise from the world’s leading innovative centers as possible, including the Silicon Valley, but will refrain from blindly copying them, without taking into account the Russian realities.

Judging by the abundance of positive feedbacks from the meetings’ participants and penned memorandums of intentions by the Silicon Valley pillars in relation to the Russian analog, one can unequivocally conclude that Medvedev has successfully sold his pet project to the global investment community in general, and the legendary Silicon Valley heavyweight CEOs, in particular. For example, John Chambers, president and CEO of Cisco Systems, one of the world's largest high-tech companies, signed a memorandum of intention to invest up to $1bln into researches and business development over 10 years in the project. Besides, Cisco also pledged to accommodate its ‘second global headquarters’ for perspective emerging technologies in Skolkovo, a move that envisions a deep localization of the company’s cut-edge technologies in Russia. Another Silicon Valley icon, Steve Jobs, the renowned Apple Steve CEO, gave the president some practical recommendations, telling him to change Russians’ mentality and business culture, if he wants innovative economy and venture capitalism, one of the main sources of financing innovative projects, to succeed in his country.

However, ex-Muscovite Sergei Brin, the Google co-founder, a Silicon Valley star of Russian origin and one of the most successful representatives of the Russian diaspora in the United States, was conspicuously absent among the IT CEOs invited to Medvedev’s meetings. It seems the Kremlin has not forgiven him his caustic criticism against his country of origin. For example, Brin has often called Russia ‘Nigeria with snows’ in terms of corruption, while labeling the CEOs of top Russian companies controlling global energy supplies ‘a bunch of criminal cowboys.’ 

The morality of the Brin issue for potential foreign investors is that Kremlin will not tolerate such demeaning behaviors in relation to Russia, just as it will equally not invite any rich foreign moneybags to the country in general and Skolkov in particular, at any cost, including swallowing all sorts of criticism for the sake of attracting foreign capital to bankroll cash-intensive projects in the country.