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In one sign of its preliminary nature, the project doesn't even have a website. But Ivan Zassoursky, a new media professor at Moscow State University, has created a group on Facebook and is helping to run a competition for the Russian Center of Internet Technologies, an organization of information technology companies, to come up with a name and a design of the facility. He says the vagueness of the effort is "sort of a healthy thing," and adds: "The Kremlin is trying to do it right. They are not trying to push and line up people and tell them what to do. This is an area where they don't think they are experts themselves and are going out of their way to reach out to the scientific community."
In the area of information technology Russia is already home to several successful companies, including Kaspersky Lab, maker of antivirus software; the search engine Yandex; and social networks Vkontakte.Ru and Odnoklassniki.Ru. Eugene Kaspersky, the founder and CEO of Kaspersky Lab, who is advising Medvedev on the innovation center and on cybersecurity issues, says Moscow has its advantages, including the fact that major educational institutions and government ministries are all nearby. On the other hand, he admits, the weather can be pretty bad, and living and office costs are very high.
But other countries have beaten the odds to create innovation centers. "If you went around in 1991, you'd see a lot of skepticism about whether Israel could establish itself as a VC hub, for any number of reasons," Lerner says. "The skeptics were wrong. So you can't be too dismissive." As for the notoriously long and brutal Russian winters, he adds: "It's cold in Boston, too."
Countries that might seem obvious centers for incubating high-tech companies have faced steep challenges. It's not enough to have a modern economy, great infrastructure, and a deep talent pool in science and technology. "If that were the case, we'd see Japan as the hub of venture capital," Lerner says. But Japan presents numerous barriers, from a tax policy that inhibits venture funding to a corporate culture that frowns on people who decide to leave large companies to chase new ideas, he says.
The Kremlin project has its critics. "The real attraction of the Kremlin's Innovation City lies not in what it will accomplish for innovation but in how it will line the pockets of Russia's corrupt officials," one opposition politician, Vladimir Ryzhkov, wrote in a recent Moscow Times op-ed. "The greedy bureaucrats are already salivating in anticipation of the hundreds of construction permits that will be required to develop a Silicon Valley from scratch."
But something must be done. Russia lost many scientists and engineers during the 1990s. Russia's economy is heavily dependent on exports of natural gas and other resources, and contracted 7.9 percent last year as demand dropped.
Russian Silicon Valley Forsakes Intellectual Freedom
There was a battle between Moscow and Novosibirsk, between central and provincial authorities and scientists, over where this Silicon Valley should be located. Scientists in Akademgorodok in Novosibirsk, which is a struggling former Soviet science town with lots of scientific talent but poor funding, advocated building on the success of the past, which in part was due to being far from centralized bureaucratic control; it was from their academy that theories for perestroika and other economic and technological innovations emerged. The Muscovites prevailed in building the center near Moscow and keeping it under tighter Kremlin control.
It shouldn't have to be explained that you cannot build a free-market phenomenon like Silicon Valley from the top-down with a government program only. In the U.S., while of course Silicon Valley has enjoyed government investment of various types, it was the big IT corporations like Microsoft and Intel and Google that gave it life and strength, and private companies like Facebook or Twitter today that keep its innovations going. There is nothing remotely similar in the Russian version of this imported concept of a tech region. A free market in labor and services, that includes programmers from foreign countries, and a vibrant free press including tech press, are all part of what makes the American Silicon Valley what it is. While Russia has left communism some years behind in its past, many of the habits and methods of the Soviet Union persist.
Most ominous is the figure of Surkov controlling this program. I've written a long, rambling account of what was called on Twitter #russtechdel -- a trip of American entrepreneurs organized by the Obama-Medvedev commission "restarting" the Russian-American relationship.
http://secondthoughts.typepad.com/second_thoughts/2010/02/rustechdel.html
For a shorter take, I think it's helpful to read the analysis of Georgy Saratov, a former Kremlin advisor, "Don't Expect Miracles from Authoritarian Modernization"
http://www.rferl.org/content/Dont_Expect_Miracles_From_Russias_Authoritarian_Modernization/1964183.html
He references an interview about the concept of the Russian Silicon Valley by Surkov in Russian which you can read here if you know Russian and you have a paid subscription (can be accessed if you have a paid Live Journal account as well)
http://www.vedomosti.ru/newspaper/article/2010/02/15/225543
What we have all found chilling about this, like other heavy-handed programs of Surkov controlling what is left of civil society in Russia is Surkov's theory of "authoritarian modernization" which is rather like Putin's theory of "managed democracy" in which free speech and free association are discarded and heavily discouraged as "disruptive obstacles" to a state-dominated innovation march:
Surkov: "If you want to throw up your hands and wait while until from the squabbling of the liberals, from their endless arguments, emerges a new economic miracle, then you have a long, long wait -- I guarantee it. You will have an extraordinarily colorful parliament. There will be talking shops everywhere -- in the presidential administration, in the government. We went through all that -- when one official says one thing and another says something else because one is working for one corporation and the other is working for a competitor."
Surkov: "If we again have disorder, conflicts, and redistribution, if we undergo Ukrainization, then no one would ever consider investing in and cultivating anything in Russia. Under the noise and chatter about freedom, they’ll carry away everything.”
And so on -- read Saratov's translation of the interviews which is accurate.
All of this is very sobering, because it means that Russia is not following the legacy of Sakharov, whose Nobel Peace Prize lecture was titled Peace, Progress, and Human Rights (http://www.sakharov-center.ru/asfconf2009/english/node/22) and who wrote the breakthrough essay in the Soviet Union, "Peace, Progress, and Intellectual Freedom" linking scientific progress with the freedom of intellectuals to criticize their government and debate ideas freely.
Instead, it is reverting to the authoritarian strain of science that produced Lysenkoism.
A key to bringing about change in the Soviet Union was when American and European scientists vigorously engaged their counterparts and did not become mere adjuncts to Kremlin projects. People like Sidney Drell and Jeremy Stone, critics of policies in their own country, were also critical interlocutors in Russia who were not afraid to denounce repression of people like Sakharov and to debate ideas with limited Soviet thinkers.
Grave human rights problems of suppression of free media and association and torture in prisons remain in Russia and the lack of a free society ultimately impedes scientific innovation as well.
The Kremlin is now trying to create a class of new programmers and engineers who will be paid off with high salaries and kept away from controversial political dissent in a golden cage. When the American visitors who included the developers of Twitter and ebay asked to see Russian human rights groups on their recent trip, they found that their Russian science hosts and counterparts start-up businessmen were made terribly uncomfortable about having to associate with people they found both politically risky and losers in society far from power. It was a very telling moment when the American delegation found that the Russian organizers of their conference in Novosibirsk allowed in only a select group of students and kept other Russian students interested in the conference waiting outside the door needlessly, and then instructed their favourites not to ask stupid questions.
Fortunately, because of the social media of Live Journal and Twitter, where Russian students were able to protest this and some of the Americans able to pick it up, the students were allowed in, and the questions able to be asked freely. That's what it takes -- foreigners engaging with Russia at each step of the way insisting on free conditions of a free society if they are going to play at being counterparts.
Interesting article. Politically, colored, though, negative from the onset. Kinda cold-war-rhetoric.
I don't know much about Russia, but from what I do now, I think they can make this happen. Because it is organized top-down and because the government decided to do so (because their 'great nation' deserves it etc.). So if needed, they will remove all the bureaucratic obstacles, taxes, etc. to reach their goal. They did similar things many times in the past (Olympics, space flight, etc.), especially during the Cold War.
However, I think the more appropriate question is whether an innovation center organized in this manner can have long-term consequences and lead to real progress. This is what I'm skeptical about, and I think the previous comment of catfitz mentions many reasons that support the skepticism.
Funny article. It's cold in Boston, too. As if the Bahamas have the biggest research labs in the world.
Russia has an incredible innovation potential. It could be a world leader again in high technology, if it manages to make the necessary reforms. However, the problems facing the Russian Federal government are vast. Above all, it needs the full commitment to such policies from all sectors of society if it is to succeed, and catch up with the West.
http://www.oxfordprospect.co.uk/Russian-R&D-Report.html
Manufacturing in the United States is in trouble. That's bad news not just for the country's economy but for the future of innovation.
Our list of the 50 most innovative companies, including the following:
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Mapou
357 Comments
It Will Succeed Only If...
Interesting article. It will succeed only if they have a revolutionary breakthrough to exploit. Silicon Valley did not succeed because a bunch of smart people got together and formed innovation centers. Silicon Valley owes its success to the introduction of a highly empowering technology known as Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI). VLSI allowed the inexpensive creation of countless new devices for communication and computation, devices that would have been impossible otherwise. However, now that the patents have run out and everybody and their kid sister can make computers and powerful chips, Silicon Valley has lost its advantage and is now moribund.
So what will it take to revive the valley? It will take another technological revolution, of course. First of all, planners need to understand why we had the first revolution. The answer is simple: VLSI solved major problems in the industry. Therefore, in order to repeat the boom days of the late 20th century, we need to identify the most pressing problem faced by the computer industry at this time and formulate a solution.
It doesn't take a PhD to realize that the biggest problem in the computer industry is the parallel programming crisis. Unfortunately, the big players in the software and processor business (Intel, Microsoft, AMD, Nvidia, IBM, etc.) are going about it the wrong way because those companies are run by baby boomers who are too married to the flawed paradigms of the last century to see the writing on the wall. The Kremlin's Silicon Valley will succeed if and only if they come out with an effective solution to this problem. Otherwise, they might as well dump all that money into the Moskva river.
How to Solve the Parallel Programming Crisis
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kcasey
12 Comments
Re: It Will Succeed Only If...
when will technology review moderate the comments? I for one am more than tired of seeing Mr. Rebel Science using the article comments thread as his own personal ad space. Come-on--Silicon Valley's demise is because of parallel programming? What's next? Crappy weather in Florida blamed on a failure to embrace new paradigms in paralell programming?
Reply
Mapou
357 Comments
Re: It Will Succeed Only If...
Wow, man. You're a little fascist Napoleon, aren't you? You like censorship, don't you? First of all, I am not selling anything to anybody. Second, you should show a little modicum of honesty when you make your accusations. Where did I write that Silicon Valley's demise is due to parallel programming? I think you should move to China or Iran and offer your services to their governments. They're like you; they don't like free speech either.
By the way, Viktor F. Vekselberg, the co-director of the project, is now repeating exactly what I suggested above. Check out this New York Times article where he is reported to have said that Russia needs a technological breakthrough. I am sure he read this Technology Review article and my comment, long before your lame comment showed up. I am sure he visited my website as well. That's kinda funny considering that you got your panties all twisted in knots. LOL.
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