GS Venture Shared How to Establish Clustered Infrastructure in Russia

St. Petersburg, Russia, October 01, 2014 --(PR.com)-- Olga Tsurupa, Deputy Head of the GS Group corporate venture fund, introduced priorities of the private technopolis development and investment opportunities of the GS Group venture fund within the panel session "Regional venture funds. Features of venture financing to generate innovations and clusters development." Gulnara Bikkulova, Director of Technology Capital and Markets Access Department, Russian Venture Company, and Mikhail Korbakov, Deputy Executive Director, Foundation for the Promotion of Development of Venture Capital Investments in Small Enterprises in the Sphere of Science and Technology of the Samara Region, served as the panel moderators. Olga Tsurupa showed a video presentation demonstrating the current development stage and prospects of the first Russian private innovation cluster Technopolis GS (the town of Gusev, Kaliningrad region) within industrial, educational, R&D and investment infrastructures.

Basing on the practical example of GS Group, the speaker introduced the benefits of the mechanism of venture investment within the cluster structures along with peculiarities of establishing and developing a venture capital fund on the Technopolis GS territory. GS Venture is aimed at investing in promising projects in microelectronics, nanotechnology and telecommunications. Meanwhile, the venture fund is ready to offer companies the material and technological base of Technopolis GS facilities for the final product mass production along with unique competences to test it on the audience.

In addition, the speaker unveiled the GS Venture key business areas and criteria of startups selection. This topic turned into a key one during the final discussions among the panel session participants followed by questions on the opportunities of implementing innovative projects in the field of nanostructured carbon materials and "smart home" technologies.

"Interestingly, the unique private cluster Technopolis GS fit in smoothly with the system of cluster development, supported by the state programs of development, that was discussed within the forum, – comments Olga Tsurupa, Deputy Head of the GS Group corporate venture fund. – It is important to point out that organizations, engaged in establishing innovative infrastructure in Russia, are willing to adopt our experience, share competencies and actively cooperate within implementation of the joint interregional projects."

One of the outcomes of GS Group participation in Samara Economic Forum is for the initiation of cooperation with regional organizations that interact with innovative high-tech projects, R&D and engineering companies, and are invisible to the general public, but are promising for the microelectronics development in Russia and, in particular, for Technopolis GS innovation cluster. Such cooperation will enable GS Venture experts to investigate in depth a wider profile of technology startups and will increase the efficiency of searching for prospective teams.

Delegates of the 8th Samara Interregional Economic Forum included around 1,000 representatives of Russian and foreign state-owned companies, industrial clusters, technopolises and technology parks along with regional organizations that form the Russian innovation ecosystem. The Forum was traditionally supported by the Ministry of Economic Development of the Russian Federation.