The government wants to transfer to Moscow some of the auxiliary functions of the Skolkovo Foundation

The government wants to transfer to Moscow part of the auxiliary functions of the Skolkovo Foundation for the development and operation of the innovation center of the same name. We are talking about the regulation of urban planning and medical activities, the development and operation of the citywide territory, the organization of transport services and public utilities. At the same time, Moscow will also bear the costs of this – budgetary financing of the center has de facto been completed, and the fund, as Kommersant’s sources say, does not have money for its infrastructure. The Skolkovo model as a participant in the global system for developing innovation through venture capital has lost its relevance, the availability of technological equipment has decreased, and corporations can receive benefits without a presence in the innovation center – and its inclusion in the Moscow economy looks rational, experts say.

The Ministry of Finance, on behalf of the president, has prepared amendments to Law 244-FZ “On the Skolkovo Innovation Center” – they transfer to the Moscow government the authority to ensure the functioning of the infrastructure of the innovation center territory (the draft is posted on regulation.gov.ru). It is assumed that the management company (Skolkovo Foundation, subordinate to VEB) will transfer to Moscow the functions of regulating urban planning and medical activities, development and operation of urban areas, organizing transport and housing and communal services. Among the “economic” functions, the foundation will only have regulation in the innovation center of education. Moscow will be able to support both the research activities of project participants and the commercialization of its results through “special events,” including jointly with the foundation.

The innovation center in Skolkovo was created in the 2010s on the initiative of then President Dmitry Medvedev and received a number of tax and customs benefits for residents, including a zero rate of income tax and exemption from property tax and VAT in order to ensure the participation of the Russian Federation in the global innovation race. Residents are subsidized customs duties for the import of goods necessary for the development of innovative products, and partially social contributions. The task of the project participants was research in five sectors (energy saving, pharmaceuticals, nuclear and space technologies and IT) in four clusters – IT, Biomed, Energotech, Promtech. In 2020, as part of the reform of development institutions, the Skolkovo Foundation came under the management of VEB. The main infrastructure facilities of the center include the Skolkovo Institute of Sciences and Technologies (Skoltech), an international gymnasium, a technology park and an Intellectual Property Center.

The Ministry of Finance project also plans to transfer expenses for urban services and infrastructure of Skolkovo to the Moscow budget (its deficit by law in 2024 will be more than 500 billion rubles, but will further decrease). Now, according to the law on the innovation center, these expenses are covered from the funds of the management company, its subsidiaries, the federal budget and other sources; amendments to them (minus “other sources”) are excluded. Moscow, de facto, is already actively participating in the development of Skolkovo (the territory of the innovation center was transferred to Moscow on July 1, 2012 when its borders were changed). The fund, as sources familiar with the situation told Kommersant, does not have money to maintain the infrastructure.

The Ministry of Finance, the Skolkovo Foundation and VEB refused to answer Kommersant’s inquiries about the reasons for what was happening. The Department of Entrepreneurship and Innovative Development of the Moscow Government limited itself to quoting from the explanatory note to the project and stating that the legislative changes “will enable the Moscow Government to develop the territory of the center and its infrastructure according to Moscow standards for the quality of the urban environment.” Kommersant’s interlocutor, who worked in Skolkovo for several years, notes that now the innovation center is a reflection of “an artificial, ill-considered approach to the development of territories, characteristic of the 2000s and 1900s,” while in Moscow there are better mechanisms for managing infrastructure and developing urban services.

Among the powers transferred to Moscow by the Skolkovo Foundation is the provision of permits for medical activities, as well as the approval of its rules and the right to provide medical care within the private healthcare system. It should be noted that an international medical cluster is already operating on the territory of Skolkovo – this is a project of the Moscow government in the field of innovative medicine, created on the basis of a law adopted in 2015 for the development of medical business with a special legal regime. On its territory, permits for medical activities, medicines, medical devices and technologies issued in OECD countries are recognized on a par with Russian permits. According to the city government’s plan, this should have allowed foreign clinics to quickly transfer technology to the Russian Federation and treat patients here according to Western standards (for more details, see “Kommersant” dated June 2, 2017). Several foreign clinics began to cooperate with the cluster – from South Korea, Spain and France, and a branch of the Israeli Hadassah clinic opened on its territory in September 2018.

Now, however, Hadassah remains, in fact, the only foreign partner of the project – the rest of the potential residents refused to cooperate with the Moscow government due to the start of the military operation in Ukraine. “Since the terms of the partnership assumed that Moscow was building the entire infrastructure from its own budget, and foreign clinics spent money only on equipping the buildings inside, those who did not have time to move into the buildings intended for them did not have time to incur any expenses. It didn’t cost them anything to leave,” explains a Kommersant source in the cluster administration.

In the absence of official comments on the situation from the structures responsible for the development of the innovation center, Kommersant discussed what was happening with officials, experts, scientists and entrepreneurs associated with the center in recent years (see Kommersant Online). The picture they describe as a whole looks like a loss of relevance of the innovation center development model both as an environment for the development of techno-startups (due to a sharp narrowing of the market and the gradual departure of foreign partners from the Russian Federation, which began after 2014 and intensified after 2022), and as a platform for “ landing” of corporate R&D (see “Kommersant” dated December 6, 2019 and June 10, 2021). Thus, in 2023, the volume of venture investments in the Russian Federation shrank more than tenfold, to $118 million (see Kommersant on March 5), while “for the successful development of startups, only two factors play the main role: high-quality, elite science and the available volume of “smart money” ready for investment is practically unlimited, this is exactly the situation in the USA or China,” explains Evgeniy Kutsenko, director of the Russian Cluster Observatory center at ISSEK National Research University Higher School of Economics. According to him, against their backdrop, the Russian Federation is experiencing a real “venture winter.” Corporate R&D does not require a mandatory “landing” in Skolkovo: amendments to the law on the innovation center, adopted in 2019 (see “Kommersant” of April 26, 2018), expanded the possibility of receiving benefits in the regions, and after 2022 they were further strengthened by industry relaxations (the most extensive for IT and R&D) with the parallel deployment of competing innovation science and technology centers. “Currently, ten innovation and technology centers are competing for promising startups and companies, which offer similar preferential conditions, but are more loyal in terms of obtaining resident status and reporting,” notes Kirill Lyakhmanov, chief legal adviser of the intellectual property practice of the EDB law firm.

Moscow’s plans in relation to it also indirectly indicate that Skolkovo is awaiting a change in the model of financing and managing innovation activities. In 2024, it is planned to create a Moscow quantum cluster in Skolkovo, which will house 27 laboratories and 15 scientific groups of the Russian Quantum Center, startups and small-scale production. “We are not engaged in scientific research, our task is to create infrastructure, help today’s scattered enterprises concentrate on these sites and find for them future buyers of their products, future consumers, including industrial enterprises in Moscow and city ones,” noted Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin.

Venera Petrova, Anastasia Manuilova, Tatyana Isakova, Oleg Sapozhkov