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Russian innovation on a roll—RF announces $1.3bn Ulyanovsk cluster |
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Oleg Kouzbit, Online News Managing Editor
Russia’s Rosatom has announced a ten-year plan to build a $1.3bn innovation park in the Ulyanovsk region. The complex will focus on nuclear energy and medicine. The announcement comes just a few months after Russia started touting its $2-3.5bn ‘Silicon Valley’ to be built in Skolkovo outside Moscow.
Russia’s government-owned nuclear energy giant, Rosatom, has unveiled $1.3+bn plans for an innovation park in the city of Dimitrovgrad, Ulyanovsk region.
The prospective facility’s focus will be a convergence of two major fields, nuclear energy and medicine. The core anchor projects for the park reportedly include a $440m Nuclear Medicine Center, a $500m multi-purpose research reactor, and a radiopharmaceutical factory. Others are expected to secure residency soon.
The Nuclear Medicine Center is scheduled for completion by 2013. Other residents will hopefully build out within ten years.
The new program will be recruiting expertise and staff from the Dimitrovgrad-based Nuclear Reactors Research Institute, set up by Academician Kurchatov in 1956 as a platform for engineering and scientific activity in civilian nuclear energy. It remains a 100% state-owned firm today.
In collaboration with authorities
Rosatom’s Denis Kovalevich said Dimitrovgrad had been chosen to become the nucleus of the state corporation’s new project, and the Ulyanovsk regional administration had reportedly offered extensive help.
Governor Sergei Morozov has pledged that the future scientific facilities will get all the infrastructure required, and he also said the region will take care of the housing, entertainment and other related issues to make Dimitrovgrad attractive for prospective employees.
The city will be receiving about $3m each year going forward for urban improvements, the governor also explained.
Clustering a path to innovation
Russia has been moving very aggressively to set up innovation clusters by luring investors with programs that include little or zero taxation and other very favorable terms.
The just announced Dimitrovgrad investment comes only three months after Russia’s highest-profile innovation cluster in Skolkovo outside Moscow was heralded as the country’s highest priority by President Medvedev.
Skolkovo is expected to take between three and seven years to build out at a taxpayer cost of between $2bn and $3.5bn. The Moscow regional project, nicknamed ‘the technopolis’ by the media, will reportedly focus on energy, aerospace technology, nuclear technology, medicine, and IT. Rosatom’s park will be cooperating with Skolkovo in their shared fields.
R&D redux?
Despite Russia’s new energy for ‘R&D clusterization’ some experts are not impressed. They question why Russia is spending billions on such costly infrastructure from the ground when for decades the country’s had dozens of R&D centers across its numerous time zones.
Skolkovo is also under fire for being a project “in an open field.”
Cluster-skeptics are frustrated and cite Russia’s various scientific and production sites, about ten all in all, generally known as ‘Closed Administrative Territorial Formations’ (abbreviated in Russian as ZATO). The general tenor of their criticism is that further development of what already exists would be a much better investment.
They feel that siphoning R&D money from sites that already have valuable expertise will eventually blunt, if not whittle away, the impact of the Kremlin’s innovative initiatives.
A ‘Chinese wall’ or an open gate?
Supporters counter that the ZATOs were set up to serve military purposes in a political structure that would find any ‘intrusion’ or ‘foreign eye’ particularly galling. But Skolkovo and Dimitrovgrad project planners specifically emphasize that the future innovation clusters are “very different” from the Soviet legacy.
What makes the idea innovative in itself, they say, is that unlike the USSR’s practice of forcing demand by the state the new programs will be market-driven.
The only way to make them truly sustainable is to keep them open, they say.
Rosatom’s Mr. Kovalevich agrees. He said that the innovation park in Dimitrovgrad would have a public research center where scientists from Russia, France, Germany, Sweden, Japan, the U.S., India, China and other countries will be welcome to work in collaboration.
Skolkovo has already announced Cisco Systems and Nokia as partners in technologic development; Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is likely to participate as an academic partner.
Unless the open creativity environment is allowed to happen at all levels, the clusters will end up being little more than government window dressing; unable to live up to their expectations and lulled by their existence into a false sense of ‘progress.’
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