Denis Kovalevich / Pyotr Shchedrovitsky

Innovation pipeline

Who is responsible for producing innovations?

Introduction

In the second half of the 20th century, the question of the sources and structure of innovation processes came to the fore on the agendas of various economic entities - from national states to transnational companies. Indeed, who can and should be responsible for the production of innovations?

What subjects and positions take on the tasks of industrial implementation
technological innovations and, as a result, an increase in labor productivity and the efficiency of the economy? So, ultimately, the responsibility for the income of workers and the standard of living of their families?
The discussion around this group of questions flares up regularly - every time a new generation of technologies replaces the previous one. Such periods are now usually called and described in terms of "industrial revolutions". We are undoubtedly lucky - our lives have fallen into another cycle of sharp disputes about innovation.

And this is no coincidence: a new industrial revolution - no matter what serial number we assign to it - according to most experts, is already knocking at the door.

However, this is not a theoretical discussion at all. The discussion about the subject, the producer of innovations is primarily between those who have already given themselves one or another answer to this question. In a sense, we can say that this is not even a discussion, but rather a mutual informing of those who have decided on the bets they have made and the need to establish agreements and rules of the game in this area.

This article is an attempt to describe how modern technology entrepreneurs answer this question - they answer by creating a new profession of venture business builder or, in other words, turning technology entrepreneurship into a serial activity - into an innovation production pipeline.
This pipeline is not created in an empty space - the quality of the innovation process will be largely determined by the actions of other professional and socio-cultural positions. Let's try to figure out who the entrepreneur sees when looking around, and with whom he will have to build a productive interaction.

500 years of partnership

In history, there is no more important partner for a technology entrepreneur than an engineer-inventor

We can safely assume that since the prevailing in their general forms by the 15th century, constructive thinking "crystallized" in engineering, economic development began to be determined by the technological division of labor.

Adam Smith showed the effects of this process with the example of the specialization of operations in the ordinary pin shop (An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 1776). The increase in labor productivity during the transition from the handicraft method of organizing labor, when the entire pin from beginning to end is made entirely by one artisan, to the technological method, when the creation of the pin is divided into 18 operations, each of which is performed by a separate specialist, amounted to 200-250 times. It was the increase in the depth of the division of labor that Smith proposed to consider as the only source of wealth formation.

To his contemporaries and even later thinkers, this idea seemed too radical. However, today we understand that he was right: the contribution made to world economy natural resources and their circulation systems, has long been incomparably small compared to the contribution of engineering inventions. Over five hundred years, the partnership between inventor and entrepreneur has spawned at least three major professional engineering activities: design, engineering, and finally applied engineering. Scientific research.

Adam Smith

Scottish economist, ethical philosopher; one of the founders of modern economic theory.

Engineering as a type of occupation and profession available before this period
only to individual "geniuses", has become a mass field of activity.

Inventors became the owners of their intellectual product: the first legal guarantees of protection intellectual property appeared at the end of the 16th century, and the famous "Statute of Monopolies", which fixed the 14-year term of patent law and limited the king's ability to autocratically establish monopoly activities, was issued in England in 1623.

Invention today, at least as we see it in Europe, is a highly specialized professional activity that involves applied researchers, engineering solution developers, industrial process technologists, systems engineers in different functions, producing various types of inventive knowledge.
The conveyor for the production of inventions is assembled, components are delivered just in time, the performance of individual sections is synchronized, and the output is a serial product with an evolving quality standard.

In parallel with the division of labor in invention, the economic role of technology entrepreneurs has also grown, compared with the contribution to the economy of those who make money on the "redistribution" of resources - wars, trade, administration, and so on. The source of business and profit for technology entrepreneurs was the flow of engineering innovation - it created a space of chance that entrepreneurs learned to use to create types of activity that did not exist before.

Joseph Schumpeter took this idea to the limit ("Theory economic development", 1912). For him, an entrepreneur is exclusively a technological entrepreneur, only one who produces innovations. It breaks down old market structures and creates new ones in their place, carrying out "creative destruction". In fact, Schumpeter not only introduced entrepreneurship as a leading position in the production process of economic development, but also put an equal sign between innovation and product. entrepreneurial activity, giving a theoretical justification for the engineering-entrepreneurial partnership.

Joseph Schumpeter

Austrian and American economist, political scientist, sociologist

Catch up and overtake

We will find a different view of the driving forces and internal structure of the processes of economic development if we focus our attention on the position of the so-called nation-state.

Since the United Provinces (modern Holland and Flanders) as a result of the "zero" produced in the early 17th century by technological entrepreneurs and engineers industrial revolution became the world economic center for more than a hundred years, dozens of countries have repeatedly set themselves the task of catching up with industrialization.

On the one hand, any catch-up industrialization has an undoubted advantage - the advantage of backwardness. It is always easier to copy someone's already developed technological achievements than to make them anew.

Discussion of the whole variety of institutional matrices of catching up industrialization is not within the scope of our consideration. At the same time, it can be argued that, as the gap in the level of industrial development between “leaders” and “applicants” widened, the national state and its administration tried to take on an ever greater role in compensating for backwardness.

Such projects were carried out at different times in different countries: in France in the 18th century; in the USA, Germany, Japan, Argentina and Russia in the 19th century; in the USSR, Mexico and China in the 20th century. Most of the catch-up industrialization projects relied, on the one hand, on the formation of strong engineering schools, and on the other hand, on the professionalization of the state apparatus itself in order to replace the functions of technological entrepreneurs with the organization of state machinery.

On the other hand, each time the question arose about the formation of those institutional mechanisms that were designed to compensate and overcompensate for the unpreparedness of legal institutions and the socio-professional organization of a given society for the industrial revolution.

The question of the effectiveness of such projects is still problematic both for representatives of various social sciences - historians, sociologists, political scientists, and for practical politics. It is important for us to emphasize that, regardless of the effectiveness of such substitution in specific countries and historical conditions, these processes have always had one common consequence - they significantly, and sometimes irrevocably distorted the structure of the main economic parameters - first of all, prices for those resources that are necessary for implementation of entrepreneurial projects. This deprived the entrepreneurial position of the right to establish the exchange values ​​of the produced product, and hence part of the property rights, squeezing out entrepreneurs to regions with less influence of the state apparatus on the economy.

But even in those countries where the question of the superiority of the entrepreneurial method of producing innovations over the state did not arise at all, since it was obvious to representatives of the national elite, entrepreneurs were forced to form institutions that would limit the rights and possible influence on the part of state structures and bureaucracy.

Today, the work of state apparatuses in many countries, in which the “natural” level of private business activity remains lower than in the countries that are leaders in the technological race, is fueled by another change in technological packages, which in its main features emerged at the turn of the 21st century. As in past historical periods, this work is by no means limited to the creation of institutions that stimulate and support innovation - that is, technological entrepreneurship and the “inventor-entrepreneur” bond, but is directly aimed at compensating for its functions.

A striking example of such a mechanism is the Amsterdam Bank (1609), the first central bank institution in history with an exchange rate regulated in accordance with the balance of business demand and supply, from which the city authorities were forbidden to borrow. Or, more recently, the UnityCreates Strength Trust of the Netherlands (1774), established to diversify the national risks of entrepreneurs by investing in other jurisdictions.

Today, the work of state apparatuses in many countries, in which the “natural” level of private business activity remains lower than in the countries that are leaders in the technological race, is fueled by another change in technological packages, which in its main features emerged at the turn of the 21st century.

As in past historical periods, this work is by no means limited to the creation of institutions that stimulate and support innovation - that is, technological entrepreneurship and the “inventor-entrepreneur” bond, but is directly aimed at compensating for its functions.

Amsterdam bank

a bank founded in Amsterdam in 1609 by entrepreneur Dirk van Os.

On duty for innovations of the XX century

The exposition will not be complete if we forget to introduce one more figure into the space of entrepreneurial orientation - the organizer (or management specialist)

Despite the fact that this is the youngest position of those named - it is only a little over a hundred years old - today it is one of the most mass professions. It should be emphasized that with its appearance and rapid growth in the twentieth century professional management owes everything to the same partnership of inventor and entrepreneur. To clarify this thesis, let's mentally fast forward to the last decades of the 19th - the very beginning of the 20th century.

In the air - the smell of oil and gasoline from the growing pace of the 2nd industrial revolution, and around - factories English pattern the end of the 18th century, playing a key role in the organization of the industrial process, butcatastrophically unprepared to accept a new package of technologies.

In terms of the level of contrast, this picture is comparable to what a modern neuroengineer sees during a tour of the steel mills of Zlatoust. In an attempt to increase labor productivity in the factory (and bring this “cell” of the first industrial revolution in line with the tasks of the globalization of economic activity at a new stage), modern management appears.

Frederick Winslow Taylor

American engineer, founder of the scientific organization of labor and management.

Frederick Taylor, mechanical engineer by training and Chief Engineer several industrial enterprises, seeing the gap between the possibility of a multiple increase in production efficiency and what their real leaders do, brings the experience of organizational development from the field of invention and engineering into the field of management. His "scientific principles of work organization" is a direct transfer of the method of dividing and specializing the work of producing various types of engineering knowledge into the sphere of leadership, organization and management. Taylor splits the knowledge needed to manage technologically more complex production into 8 various groups- types of managerial activities, placing them literally at different levels, floors of organizational and managerial activities.

Among the pioneers of the new era, those who managed to fully use the results of Taylor and his followers, was Henry Ford, who built the first technological transnational corporation from scratch. This is not surprising - after all, Taylor's practical work at that time faced stiff resistance from labor unions, capital investors and many engineers, since it was focused primarily on restoring the lost functions of technological entrepreneurship in old companies. Gantt, describing the purpose of his diagrams, characterized them as “conditions for the functioning and development of the production and entrepreneurial system” (“Organization of Labor”, 1919).

Henry Lawrence Gantt

American engineer, colleague of "father scientific management» Frederic Taylor. Gantt studied management through the construction of ships during World War I and proposed his bar chart (tasks) and dots (terminating tasks or milestones) as a means of representing the duration and sequence of tasks in a project.

Following Taylor, his student and colleague engineer Henry Gantt, together with his colleagues, Karol Adametsky and Walter Polyakov, created the first professional management tools - scheme maps for production planning, known to any first-year management student as "Gantt charts".

Among the pioneers of the new era, those who managed to fully use the results of Taylor and his followers, was Henry Ford, who built the first technological transnational corporation from scratch. This is not surprising - after all, Taylor's practical work at that time faced stiff resistance from labor unions, capital investors and many engineers, since it was focused primarily on restoring the lost functions of technological entrepreneurship in old companies. Gantt, describing the purpose of his charts, characterized them as “conditions for the functioning and development of the production and entrepreneurial system” (“Organization of Labor”,
1919).

In an attempt to professionalize some of the entrepreneurial work to increase the productivity of factories, Taylor created an opportunity for the emergence new form organization of the industrial process.

It is this pair - the transnational corporation and the professional management that underlies it - that becomes the main producer of innovations during most of the 20th century.

A significant part of the innovations captures the sphere of the so-called "organizational innovations", that is, the methods and forms of operationalization and organization of activities that were difficult for that time. At the same time, traditional engineers are moving en masse to corporate R&D centers, reasonably counting on the stability of large companies and the literacy of their management personnel.

The share of technological outsourcing by corporations, which at the end of the 19th century reached almost 100% (and at the end of the 1st industrial revolution, almost all inventions were carried out outside the boundaries of companies and factories - in private laboratories and universities), by the 60s of the 20th century was reduced to hardly noticeable 3 % - only those studies, the results of which are not industrially oriented, actually remain outside the TNCs.

Not surprisingly, as the potential to improve the efficiency of technologies and industries of the 2nd Industrial Revolution, such as automobiles, fertilizers, organic fuel, antibiotics, etc., the number of inventive organizations independent of TNCs is again starting to grow: in the late 90s, the share of techno-outsourcing was already 25% and will inevitably increase further.

Expensive pleasure

In every product we use
in early XXI century, the share of direct and indirect management costs ranges from 50 to 80%.

At the same time, the price of management itself began to rise sharply. In an attempt to understand and grasp new technological trends, managers of the largest corporations began to invest in additional training, in even greater specialization of management, and finally, directly in increasing their numbers, significantly increasing the average level of payment for this. Inflation, which is formed largely due to the growth in the cost of labor, has long been unable to keep pace with the growth in managers' incomes.

In every product that we use at the beginning of the 21st century, the share of direct and indirect management costs ranges from 50 to 80%. If this is difficult to feel on household items, then go to manufacturing facility any vertically integrated company and take an interest in the amount of overhead costs - if they don’t lie to you, they will name a figure from 200 to 800%.

At the same time, the degree of influence of this professional group on the growth of labor productivity and the rate of mastering new technologies is falling catastrophically. To the same extent that the potential of material technologies, which formed the basis of the second industrial revolution, is exhausted, the “service life” of intellectual, “knowledge” technologies, which performed their role well in the previous round of development, is also ending.

Management, created by a partnership of engineers and entrepreneurs to increase labor productivity, a hundred years later became one of the key reasons for its decline, ceasing to perform that part of the functions within the implementation of entrepreneurial projects that were transferred to it.

However, do not underestimate social role managers - it is unlikely that any other player in the field of innovation processes today has a more powerful restraining effect on the pace of technological development.

So, in the “field of innovations”, in addition to the technological entrepreneur, we see, firstly, a group of labor-divided and therefore super-productive inventors who, due to the low utilization rate of their results, try to perform some of the entrepreneurial tasks themselves, which, of course, results from hands out badly; secondly, government officials who sincerely believe that they have taken into account the mistakes of their predecessors and their new tools will certainly allow them to ride technological development this time; and, thirdly, the finally formed union of super-prepared and confident in the inviolability of the future of large corporations of managers, the number of specializations of which exceeds the number of seats in an average-sized football stadium.

The method of navigation described by us, which singles out the participants in the innovation process and gives an understanding of their goals, is needed by the entrepreneur only for one thing - to start - taking into account the identified characteristics of the positional landscape - to the development and implementation of entrepreneurial projects.

So how do technology entrepreneurs operate today, in the situation of the start of a new industrial revolution?

Mastery vs Serialization

Over the past 25 years, in regions with a high density of inventive activity, one can meet
with a phenomenon that did not exist before -
serial technological entrepreneurship

This new form of organization of the entrepreneurial process does not yet have a common name - they are called innovation networks, entrepreneurial artels, start-up studios or start-up factories. But all of them are united by one characteristic - their mass product has become new technology businesses. They are serially conceived, developed, produced and sold.

In Cambridge, England, an entrepreneurial artel, one of the leaders of which is Herman Hauser, produces a dozen new companies a year, and in general, a hundred thousand university campus creates more than a hundred start-ups a year. In Leuven, Belgium, Leuven research and development, established 40 years ago as a technology transfer center, but today an organization that is actually independent of the university, creates a dozen start-ups a year, and the entire Leuven cluster (also with a population of 100,000) creates 40–50. The private-state Russian network of start-up factories - nanotechnology centers - has been producing 200 companies annually for several years in a row.

These are no longer isolated random outbreaks - we are facing a new type of venture-building business that is gaining momentum. It should not be confused with venture capital funds, which perform the sole function of investing capital raised from various sources in startups they don't create.

The serial construction of technology companies is an invasion of the holy of holies of entrepreneurship, a bet on the transformation into a new profession of what was previously considered the indescribable and incommunicable art of a few business geniuses. This attempt is similar in its logic to the one that was started 120 years ago and was realized in the creation of the profession of an organizer-manager. Another 300 years earlier, engineering work was successfully subjected to normalization and massification.

In parallel with the production of their main product - technological start-ups - venture builders develop the basic principles and norms of the entrepreneurial activity itself, which, once formulated and described, become suitable for dissemination.

As the specific goals, means, basic operations and products of serial entrepreneurship are voiced, coupled with the splitting of previously indivisible entrepreneurial knowledge, an increasing number of people are gaining access to participation in entrepreneurial activities. The participants in the construction of startups are those who previously could not relate themselves to the business legends from the past and the Elon Musks of the present.

The price of time

How is it possible that a company—not the products it develops and manufactures, but the newly built company itself—became an independent mass marketplace?

The presence of an invention - whether it be a new technical principle, a complex engineering device, or a manufacturing technology - does not say anything about what kind of business can be created on its basis. We know dozens of unique engineering solutions that have never been used in the economy. We also know thousands of inventions that failed to build sustainable businesses.

J. Schumpeter, already mentioned by us, considered innovation not the invention itself, but the realized method of its use in the systems of technological division of labor. After all, it is never known in advance what exactly from the technologically realistic "menu of inventions" will be economically justified. It is this process that entrepreneurs are responsible for, through the implementation of their business experiments, excluding countless options and projects from consideration.

They invest in creating new activity the only irreplaceable factor is your time. The first of the entrepreneurs who achieves a result becomes a kind of monopolist.

Not due to squeezing out competitors from the markets, but due to the fact that it comes in new system division of labor first, or rather, creates it. All other participants in the "innovative race" fall into a catching up position in relation to it. In this situation, in order to regain their lead, they can and often do make the most important decision: save time by buying what the first entrepreneur did.

Samsung, which has made a bet on leadership in smartphones due to flexible screens, is serially buying startups that develop the technology packages it needs.

Siemens follows the same logic, acquiring the Belgian startup LMS for several hundred million euros, which created the world's best technology for 3D simulation and modeling of complex mechatronic systems for aviation, engine building and other applications at that time. The examples can be continued ad infinitum.

In situations of changing technological platforms and launching new rounds of technological revolutions, the time that inevitably needs to be spent on choosing and including an invention in industrial circulation becomes a determining factor in the cost of new companies and a critical parameter of success for growing businesses.

We can safely say that it is the time spent on the process of business experimentation, rolled up in the form of a new company, that is the product that the entrepreneur sells. And the buyer becomes the one for whom - due to the increased speed of technological change and the economic futility of trying to do everything alone - time has become "more valuable than money."

Age of Affiliation

Saved time is the product that venture builders offer to managers from large and medium-sized companies for embedding in the emerging industries of the new industrial revolution.

Those of them whose companies were created on the basis of the old technological platform and on the model of highly integrated corporations, in order to “use” a startup, must first go through an extremely painful stage of “unpacking” their vertical structures. Without passing it, they risk losing their investments. The well-knit organizational machines of these companies are able to grind the core of new businesses with a diligence worthy of better use.

In the practice of serial entrepreneurs of the last decade, one can find many situations when they made decisions to sell the startup they made at a lower price, but only to the company that was ready to accept it without destroying it. Companies capable of such "smart" action, whose age is hardly more than 25-30 years old, are often called third-generation corporations to distinguish them from the classic multinational corporations of the twentieth century.

For example, ASML, the world leader in the production of lithographic machines, has not only built a distributed network of thousands of suppliers producing 95% of all the components it needs, but also created consortiums of R&D partners, leaving behind only the most complex technical processes. The size of technological outsourcing of the world's first lithographic company has reached over the past ten years 50% of the total amount of development required for the development of this technology.

Today, ASML is taking another step that breaks traditional management patterns by forging alliances with serial technology entrepreneurs, effectively putting them technical task to create new types of business necessary for the future development of the company. The deep mutual affiliation of business is changing from a forbidden technique to a key characteristic of entrepreneurship in the era of the new industrial revolution.

ASML Holding N.V.

ASML is a Dutch company, the largest manufacturer of photolithographic systems for the microelectronic industry

Open Odds

How does an entrepreneur navigate the surfeit of invention and highlight technologies that could be the next generation business?

The ASML case is an example of a new but already highly developed industry - nanoelectronics. More often, a modern technological entrepreneur has to deal with the creation of systems of division of labor that have not yet been established, in which there are no major players and value chains built yet. How does a serial entrepreneur know what to do in such a situation? How does he navigate the inventions produced by engineers in excess and highlight technologies that become candidates for creating next-generation businesses on their basis?

Answering this question, our imagination draws a semblance of a market-bazaar, wandering between the trading rows of which the hero-entrepreneur makes decisions in a strong-willed way - intuitively choosing promising developments. Probably, today you can meet this way of working as an entrepreneur, but it is also far from the reality of a serial venture builder, like a Ford assembly line from boutique auto repair shops. late XIX century. In recent decades, the inventor-entrepreneur partnership has taken a giant step towards technologizing the work of producing entrepreneurial chances.

Any individual invention, regardless of its performance characteristics- acquires its value only in connection with its possible participation in a long technological chain.

The conditions for the success of individual technological rates of a serial venture builder are, firstly, the mutual matching of the parameters of a particular technology with neighboring sections of the chain and, secondly, the economic efficiency of the entire system of technological division of labor that is still being created.

It makes no sense to invest in the creation of technology of super-productive equipment for the weaving of composites, if, on the one hand, it cannot be provided with sufficient volume required material, and on the other hand, a sufficient scale of use of its product by consumers. In fact, in the situation of an industry that has not yet been formed, a serial technological entrepreneur invests his time and resources simultaneously along the entire length of the future value chain, or, in any case, on the basis of integral assessments of its structure and formation rates. Its current priorities for action depend on which new activities in the emerging division of labor have lagged behind other types of activity that are growing more intensively in their pace of development. Its operating space is a kind of interactive map that shows the maturity levels of individual elements of the future value chain, including the so-called final consumption.

The screens located in the "situation room" of the venture builder display the actions that are being carried out by all those who work with him to create a new industry - the plans and programs of engineers, the investments of technology companies and, of course, the actions of other entrepreneurs. Only with such regularly updated knowledge in front of him can the serial entrepreneur make decisions about his priorities at any particular moment in time.

The function of a kind of headquarters for the builders of technology companies is performed today by new forms of engineering-business partnerships. In 2014, the Solliance Center, the world's largest alliance for surface-integrated photovoltaics (BIPV), opened on the Eindhoven high-tech campus. Four large European technology centers (IMEC, ECN, TNO, Julich), a group of leading engineering universities (Eindhoven, Delft, Leuven, Hasselt, etc.), several dozen companies-developers and manufacturers of complex equipment and materials ( VDL, DSM, Roth & Rau, etc.) and those technology companies that plan to use BIPV technologies in their development (among them is the German metallurgy giant ThyssenKrupp). On one site, not only the entire future production chain on an industrial scale of technologies was assembled, but, most importantly, those players who claim to occupy various business positions in the future division of labor system became partners with each other.

The platform organized in this way became a demo example of the structure of future industries - for example, the industry of new building materials with solar films integrated into their surfaces for roofs, windows and facades. This allowed venture builders, including Russian ones, to become Solliance's system partners. On the technology and position map of this collective technology producer, as on a screen, you can see how the density of the efforts already made to create a new industry is distributed and, most importantly, what places are free. The task of such an alliance is not only the development of a package of technologies, but also the exchange of activity knowledge within a multiprofessional community, knowledge about the opportunities that open up for a limited time due to the actions of many players. This knowledge plays the role of a chance for a serial entrepreneur - on its basis he builds the architect of future businesses.

Available Technologies

So, the tech entrepreneur has produced goals - he knows what kind of businesses it makes sense to build now and how much time he has for this. These goals are realized by the entrepreneur's access to the technologies necessary for creating a business.

Probably, due to the long closed economy of our country and the almost complete absence of 3rd generation companies, a set of persistent myths has developed around the issue of access to technology. Of these, the two main myths - about the closedness of the world's best engineering inventions and about the extremely high cost of advanced technologies - do not stand up to the test of action.

We have already mentioned above that during periods of changing technological platforms, non-captive (independent from large corporations) engineering centers and various types of their consortiums play a key role in the creation of new technologies. The economic sustainability and independence of modern R&D centers is impossible without such models of cooperation with entrepreneurs that would allow engineers to transfer the maximum number of their inventions to industrial circulation. To do this, on the one hand, they involve a wide range of entrepreneurs and companies in setting goals for their developments, and on the other hand, they share their costs between them, making technologies financially accessible.

Here are some examples. Scientists at the Israeli Weizmann Institute of Science carry out applied research, some of which is patented. The decision on which results to patent is made by an entrepreneurial council independent of the institute (the institute does not carry out contract work with any corporation in the world). Licenses to use patents are transferred free of charge - subject to future royalties. And this despite the fact that the average period from the publication of the results of scientists to the appearance of the product on the counter is 15-20 years. Such a scheme opens access to cutting-edge research for any technology entrepreneur who knows exactly how he intends to use the content of the patent.

Industrial technologists from IMEC, the world's largest independent R&D center in the field of microelectronics and its applications, collect so-called affiliation programs. Each program is focused on creating a package of technologies for one of today's emerging industries - from large-scale flexible electronics to mass integrated sensors. Industrial partners of the program can simultaneously be several dozen companies, between which the costs are divided. So, for example, if the annual cost of IMEC's ​​work in a specific area is 5 million euros and there are 10 partners in the program, then each of them pays 500 thousand a year, while receiving non-exclusive rights to all intellectual property produced under this program. Non-exclusive rights for an entrepreneur working at the stage of the birth of a new industry are quite enough to conduct their business experiments.

At the same time, such a model significantly increases the level of business expertise of the developed industrial technologies, sharply reducing the number of engineering errors and thereby reducing the development time. The common term "open innovation" in this context means nothing more than the mass access of entrepreneurs with virtually any amount of capital to the best global technologies that are created in a shorter time than in traditional intra-corporate models.

Total outsourcing

Knowing what to do and where to get the right technology, the serial technology entrepreneur sets out to build a specific business with a limited amount of time to do so.

How can he do this faster than other entrepreneurs or large technology corporations?

The key working principle of venture building is to single out and focus the efforts of the startup's engineering team only on the technological core of the future business, distributing all other tasks without exception for outsourcing. When we use the term outsourcing here, we are talking not so much about the functions that ensure the creation of a company - legal, financial, accounting, reporting, and others. First of all we are talking about transferring most of the technological processes outside the startup - from industrial design and prototyping to the development of individual components and mass production of the product.

A particular consequence of this model is the structure of the budget of a typical startup - in it the share of personnel costs cannot exceed 20-30%. This often contradicts the standards by which the majority of both Russian and foreign state development institutions provide financial support for innovation.

The focus of the team on one key node of the business leads to a dramatic acceleration of engineering work. Count how many hours every day each of us spends on secondary tasks - experience shows that this time is from 50 to 70% of the length of the working day. In addition to reducing direct loss of time, maximum focus makes it possible to use the “mileage length” factor – the amount of knowledge and skills accumulated, as they say, “at the fingertips” of engineers.

Studies show that success in any engineering profession directly depends on how long a person does not interrupt his work in a particular specialization.

Those who consistently delve in one direction for more than 10 thousand hours automatically fall into the top thirty experts on this subject in the world. Continuous efforts of more than 20 thousand hours allow the engineer to claim one of the leadership positions.

A venture builder can quickly distribute all tasks that are not related to the basic process of a new company only where he has access to the types of activities that correspond to the technological profile of a startup. In relation to the process of creating a startup, they actually play the role of infrastructure. In operational terms, not only the physical proximity of infrastructures ready to provide technological services is important, but also the business model of their work. Therefore, the basis of any modern cluster that meets the requirements of serial entrepreneurship is open contract technology services and production.

This business model assumes that service technology companies do not have their own product, rely on increasing the speed and reducing the cost of engineering and production processes, and, finally, a flexible way of pricing their services depending on the complexity of the tasks received. In machining, the possibility of building such “infrastructure” businesses was opened by a combination of latest generations CNC and industrial additive technologies; in industrial biotechnologies, genomic sequencing and genetic engineering play the role of infrastructure.

Hard and soft infrastructures
serial entrepreneurship

per model open service transition today and such seemingly uncontested internal functions of each company, such as personnel management.

Engineer leasing is one of the fastest growing infrastructure business sectors in the world. At least half of the engineering qualifications needed by a startup are only needed for a limited period of time - from several months to several years, so it is in every sense more profitable for a venture builder to hire the right specialist for a specific task. The engineer himself also benefits from this type of cooperation with the entrepreneur. He can, within the framework of his basic specialization, take part in various projects in his field, which, without a doubt, increases the depth of his competencies.

Against the backdrop of this process, last year’s decision by Russian legislators to ban personnel leasing looks surprising - the desire to “whitewash” the market for babysitting and other types of self-employment deprives Russian venture builders of the opportunities offered by the main global trend in personnel management technologies.

Finally, different types of technologies need not only different equipment and different engineers, but also different types of premises and different engineering infrastructure. Over the past ten years, a whole galaxy of technologically specialized development companies has grown in the world. Their staff, along with architects and designers, are experts from the relevant industries (biotechnology, microelectronics, etc.), who know exactly what conditions are necessary for their type of technological process, how professional equipment develops and what requirements its development places on premises.

Today, such developers not only fulfill the tasks of large customers (corporations, R&D centers and universities) with high quality, but also independently invest in the creation of specialized infrastructure at specific points - under groups of technology startups that have not yet been created by entrepreneurs. Investment decisions with such a level of risk, which goes far beyond the usual parameters for the development business, are made by these companies only in conjunction with venture builders. It is the latter - due to the serial nature of their activities - that can give realistic guarantees of filling and cost-effective use of new, strictly specialized premises.

Most of these service businesses are highly capital intensive, making it extremely difficult to concentrate the infrastructure for several new technology packages at one particular location. Roughly speaking, today the cost of an “infrastructure package” in any of the areas of development of the new industrial revolution is such that one cluster can afford to supply only one such full-fledged package. For venture builders, the specialization of local ecosystems determines the geography of their activities: it makes sense to create startups in the field of flexible electronics in Europe - in Eindhoven and Cambridge and in Russia - in Troitsk, and, for example, in the field of regenerative medicine - in Leuven, Berlin and Novosibirsk.

The principles described above allow serial entrepreneurs to treat their work like any other. production process: the faster and cheaper the company is produced, the greater the amount of possible profit the entrepreneur will receive when selling it. The mechanism of "total division of labor" allows you to regulate the cost and, to the necessary extent, influence the speed of the pipeline for the creation of technological start-ups.

The reason for this is clear: it is the investor who is trusted with the last word in deciding to what extent this or that project idea is worthy of accepting capital.

This division of responsibility model assumes that the investor is able, through experience, to separate the really worthwhile proposals from the unrealistic ones. He also has the task of evaluating the project team, business model, market potential, etc. In fact, he is delegated the lion's share of entrepreneurial work. In the end, saving the drowning (investing money) is the work of the drowning (investors) themselves.

Traditional investors - due to this workload - hire a staff of business analysts and investment financiers with an MBA degree in the background. Those, in turn, flood startups with templates of documents to be filled out, hire consultants for individual markets and technologies, prepare multi-page business plans and submit them for approval by the boards of directors of their investment / venture funds.

Experts and controllers often ask the question: is such performance of work - 3% per year - worth the cost of a management fee, that is, up to 20% of the total capital of the fund over the seven-year period of its existence? An investor can answer only one thing - successful sales of invested companies and the amount of profit at the time of closing the fund.

The issues facing the venture builder, who invests both his own and attracted investments in the companies he creates, are different. Isn't it stupid to make a “strong-willed bet” at the starting point of creating a new business and be determined by all the key technological forks? Moreover, their passage - in a situation of changing technological platforms and redundancy of candidate solutions - is the essence of his, venture builder, work.

Why waste time on preparing volumes of calculations and graphs, if real knowledge about the economic performance of a particular engineering solution and the extent of consumption that has not yet been formed can be obtained only in the process of building a business? Finally, how should venture-building investment be arranged so that its principles allow one to regulate the pace and amplitude of the volume of invested capital - up to the “freeze-thaw” procedure for start-ups, depending on the actual speed of building a particular company?

This idea of ​​entrepreneurial work, coupled with the seriality of the process, allows venture builders to radically restructure investment practices that have developed earlier. Most often, serial entrepreneurs try to divide large investments in physical infrastructure (equipment and specialized premises) from investments in intellectual property packages and investments in product start-ups. This division allows them, on the one hand, to break the direct dependence of the success of capital investments on the success of specific startups, and on the other hand, to increase the efficiency of using capital-intensive equipment due to its selection, which makes it possible to use it simultaneously in several businesses created by the entrepreneur. Why waste time on the preparation of volumes of calculations and schedules, if real knowledge about the economic performance of a particular engineering solution and the scale of consumption that has not yet been formed can be obtained only in the process of building a business? Finally, how should venture-building investment be arranged so that its principles allow one to regulate the pace and amplitude of the volume of invested capital - up to the “freeze-thaw” procedure for start-ups, depending on the actual speed of building a particular company?

At each next moment of work on creating a company, the initial stock of capital decreases, and the key question is whether the entrepreneur will have time to build an operating company, that is, a company that independently reproduces the resource for its functioning, in the limited time for which he has enough resources. The time limit of “disinvestment” is what the entrepreneur is dealing with.

This idea of ​​entrepreneurial work, coupled with the seriality of the process, allows venture builders to radically restructure investment practices that have developed earlier. Most often, serial entrepreneurs try to separate large investments in physical infrastructure (equipment and specialized premises) from investments in intellectual property packages and investments in product startups. This division allows them, on the one hand, to break the direct dependence of the success of capital investments on the success of specific start-ups, and on the other hand, to increase the efficiency of using capital-intensive equipment due to its selection, which makes it possible to use it simultaneously in several businesses created by the entrepreneur.

For a portfolio investor, such an approach to investing is fundamentally impossible. Even if he invests in several companies at once, they should be - according to the logic of financial risk diversification - not related to each other.

He always invests in an individual entrepreneur who, in turn, builds only one business. This means that if an entrepreneur misses the time limit of “investment”, it means writing off the spent resources, at best, with compensation to the investor of a small part of them due to the sale of material traces of the project in the secondary market.
There are many examples of such situations. Because of this, today traditional investors mainly act in relation to serial entrepreneurs in the position of one of the types of buyers of the companies they produce - along with large corporations.

This typical conversation brings us back to the key idea of ​​this article, which is its red thread - to the thesis of economic development due to the deepening of the technological division of labor. At the level of intuition, it is understandable and accepted by the majority of observers attentive to economic reality. However, as soon as we transfer the same principle from the sphere of material production to the sphere of intellectual processes - to the production of knowledge, intuition fails.

At the beginning of the article, we mentioned the work that the founders of modern management, Frederick Taylor and Henry Gantt, did by dividing the previously merged activities of the factory manager into 8 separate specialized management positions. This work subsequently made it possible to create several orders of magnitude more complex management systems - transnational corporations. Until the moment of a radical increase in the depth of the division of intellectual managerial labor, this could not only be realized, but even predicted. And of course, the increase in the level of productivity of management systems that allowed the economy of the 20th century to develop at a previously unimaginable pace would not have been possible.

We argue that in the 21st century the same fate of specialization and technologization will befall entrepreneurship, at least its content that allows technologically and serially - that is, steadily, repeatably, with an increasing level of quality - to create new technological companies. In different regions of the world, we can see examples of such work. We can highlight the already established norms of venture building - we have described some of them in this article.

There is no doubt that serial entrepreneurship sets new format economic development - by analogy with the main invention of the last century, we called it the "conveyor for the production of innovations." The formation of any new activity takes several decades - it will take no less time for serial technological entrepreneurship to become a mass activity accessible - through the division of labor and specialization - to many millions of people in the world.

Former places of work and positions: Advisor to the Plenipotentiary Representative of the President of the Russian Federation in the Volga Federal District on Strategic Development; Deputy General Director for strategic development- Director of the Directorate for the Scientific and Technical Complex of the State Atomic Energy Corporation "Rosatom"; Advisor to the Minister of Education and Science Russian Federation; Head of the Department "Strategic Planning and Management Methodology" National Research Nuclear University "MEPhI"; Deputy Director of the Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

Among the achievements: for many years he has been an expert and consultant on spatial development, regional and industrial policy, innovation and training; is the founder of the School of Cultural Policy; was awarded the badge “Academician I.V. Kurchatov” II degree, badge “E.P. Slavsky”, Medal of the Order “For Services to the Fatherland”, II degree; is the author of over 200 publications.

Kovalevich Denis Alexandrovich

General Director of Nanotechnology Center "Technospark" (Troitsk)

Entrepreneur, member of the Interdepartmental Commission for Technological Development of the Presidential Council for Economic Modernization and Innovation, member of the boards of directors of the Ulyanovsk, Tomsk and Novosibirsk nanotechnology centers; coordinator of the national technological platform "Radiation Technologies".

Previous places of work and positions: Executive Director of the Nuclear Technology Cluster of the Skolkovo Foundation; Director for Strategy and Innovation, State Atomic Energy Corporation Rosatom; Deputy General Director for Development and Investments of the Territorial Generating Company N5.

Achievements include: launching a series of startups and spin-offs from the nuclear industry on new applications of nuclear, radiation and laser technologies in medicine, electronics and industry; creation of organizational development mechanisms for a group of pilot regional innovation clusters; development state program innovative development nuclear industry and an international report on the foresight of radiation technologies; preparation of a localization project in Russia for a global technology company.

In February, the Ministry of Economic Development will consider development programs for the first innovation-industrial clusters in Russian single-industry towns. They will receive financial support from the federal budget.

The "closed" city of Zheleznogorsk in the Krasnoyarsk Territory was on the short list of applicants. 30 industrial enterprises and 3,000 new jobs can be created here. St. Petersburg, Sarov (Nizhny Novgorod region), Dimitrovgrad (Ulyanovsk region), Obninsk also apply for the status of innovation clusters.

But the final decision on which programs will be approved will be made by a government commission in late April or early May. This was announced to RG during the Krasnoyarsk Economic Forum by Denis Kovalevich, Executive Director of the Skolkovo Nuclear Technology Cluster.

Denis Alexandrovich, you took part in the development of programs. Why did they stake on clusters?

Denis Kovalevich: They create a "window of opportunity" for the development of small and medium-sized businesses in cooperation with large enterprises supported by public investment in infrastructure.

Today it is not companies that compete, but clusters. They allow you to gather many production levels in a relatively small area: system design, production of materials and components, final production and assembly of systems, marketing. It's time to learn to work in this model of "distributed labor", "distributed economy".

Our only chance for sustainable development in the nuclear industry is to move from the logic of "industry" cities focused on the needs of one customer to such clusters, which are oriented, among other things, to external consumers. But still the federal targeted programs, regional support was built on the principle of "all sisters in earrings." The cluster is an idea that opposes this approach. And the state is moving towards these priorities, concentrating already existing state programs in one cluster.

What are the features of the Zheleznogorsk cluster?

Denis Kovalevich: In this city with a population of 100,000, there are enterprises of two high-tech and priority sectors for the country's economy. Mining and chemical plant, which has a strong position in the world market, and the largest manufacturer of satellites in Russia with 10-12 percent of the world market. In addition, there is a large private company producing polysilicon for solar panels.

We look at this city as a territory that is potentially competitive on a global scale. The task is to complete the emerging cluster to a full-fledged point of competitiveness. That is, to create at least 30 industrial enterprises, 3,000 new jobs, and an industrial technopark. Build a modern energy infrastructure, roads. Find intersections between nuclear and space topics. Gather on the territory of both Russian and foreign contractors, small and medium-sized companies - suppliers of individual solutions. By the way, one of the large private companies is ready to give them a "financial leverage" of 1 billion rubles.

And what is the maximum program of this cluster?

Denis Kovalevich: For the next 50 years, the existing and future enterprises of Zheleznogorsk must maintain and increase their positions in the world market for nuclear and space technologies.

Creating clusters is a costly project. For example, Singapore estimates the cost of a hectare of a modern industrial and scientific cluster at a billion dollars. How many of them can be created in Russia?

Denis Kovalevich: In the nuclear industry - three or four points. Another possible pilot project is the city of Sarov, which is developing the production of supercomputers and IT technologies, is developing software, laser technologies, materials science. Since January of this year, we have opened a project office in Sarov. The task is to increase the share of Sarov participants in Skolkovo, to help shape ideas into projects, to assemble a team. We are planning a similar representation in Snezhinsk, in Zheleznogorsk. If the model bears fruit, it can be broadcast to other cities. For example, Novosibirsk Akademgorodok.

Nuclear topics are one of the most popular in Skolkovo. In 2011, you received 70 applications from small innovative companies in this area.

Denis Kovalevich: By the way, in half a year of the cluster's operation, we essentially "started" in June 2011. Of the 70 applications, 45 were approved by the experts. Skeptics said that there would be no projects at all. Most of the applications came from regional centers- Novosibirsk, Tomsk, Yekaterinburg, Obninsk, Dubna - from where the nuclear industry exists. For comparison, an American venture fund, which already invests in nuclear and related technologies, considers reviewing about 200 projects a year to be a good indicator.

Are they in demand in the market?

Denis Kovalevich: Yes, the priority of the Skolkovo nuclear cluster is in the field of application of new, non-energy nuclear technologies. Three key topics - radiation technologies, new materials and management life cycle are actively developing all over the world.

The market for radiation technology, including applications such as nuclear medicine, security, is a combined $25 billion globally. The growth rates of the radiation technology markets are generally high (7-12%) and 3-4 times higher than for the nuclear energy markets. There is a place for entrepreneurial activity, the emergence of fundamentally new businesses. In 2012, we plan to reach the level of at least two grants per month and invest about 400 million rubles annually in innovative developments in the field of nuclear technology

In nuclear medicine, for example, Russia is ten years behind. What projects are selected by Skolkovo in this case?

Denis Kovalevich: It lags behind, but not in all directions. There is, for example, a breakthrough project for the development of neutron therapy. It can be used to treat resistant tumors located near vital organs - the head, neck, eyes. This technology is just beginning to be seriously mastered in the world. The transition from experimental mode to industrial implementation requires the development medical standards. We are now doing this within the framework of the technology platform "Radiation Technologies", approved by the Prime Minister in April 2011. Similar solutions and standards development require security systems based on nuclear technology at airports, customs, food industry (radiation processing of food), for cleaning Wastewater. We have the opportunity to get new products and technologies that are not yet in the world. There are pilot plants in St. Petersburg, where exhaust from pipes is cleaned due to the flow of electrons.

The second, extremely important line is new materials. For example, carbon fiber composites, which were originally used in the nuclear industry to create centrifuges. Today they are widely used in construction, in the aviation industry, in the automotive industry, and in aerospace.

Many Western companies are actively entering Russian market with the latest medical technologies, including nuclear. Does Skolkovo somehow work with them?

Denis Kovalevich: We have many joint projects with Western companies and we believe that cooperation is an integral element of innovative development and subsequent commercialization of projects through integration into global production and technological chains. For example, the Novosibirsk Institute of Nuclear Physics named after G.I. Budker participates in joint project with Siemens on the development of accelerator technology. He was the first to receive a grant in nuclear cluster in Skolkovo. Siemens is granting Novosibirsk a license for the further production of this equipment. As a result, a joint venture is being created in Novosibirsk, where fundamentally new products will be manufactured.

Deloitte, in 2018 the number of mergers and acquisitions will continue to grow, and the acquisition of technologies will be the main driver of this process. Building a high-tech business quickly in order to sell it is one of the effective business models. This is how, for example, the venture construction company Technospark works, which annually launches a dozen startups. The General Director and one of the private shareholders of Technospark, Denis Kovalevich, calls this approach a conveyor belt, it frees entrepreneurs from the need to step on the same rake several times and allows them to accumulate experience super-intensively. Denis Kovalevich told Inc. how to build a business in the hardware industry by investing millions of rubles, not dollars, why there are global ambitions in a small market, and why the innovation pipeline needs people who are ready to engage in entrepreneurship.

Knowledge and business pipeline

We are not an accelerator or an incubator - we are building a business. An accelerator is, in fact, a university: its basic task is to educate people through projects (like in an MBA when they analyze cases). For us, training is just an additional effect.

We do not wait for brilliant entrepreneurs with brilliant ideas. We organize work with those who are ready and want to engage in entrepreneurial work. Every year we create a dozen and a half new companies and open several dozen entrepreneurial positions.

Our technology is not a funnel, but a conveyor. The funnel is the approach of traditional venture capital funds. Each of them receives thousands of applications for investments, looks at hundreds of startups live, invests in a dozen of them and after 7-10 years sells a few at an extremely high price, and writes off the rest. Such a business normally exists only in places with an inexhaustible influx of human capital and tens of thousands of new startups a year. We in Russia cannot count on this and must build our business differently. Of the 100 companies we have launched over the past 5 years, 10 already have growing contract revenue or salable product, these are the most sell-ready companies and will be sold in the coming years. The next 30 - we call them "candidates" - are developing their products at full speed, most of them we will transfer to the group of leaders in the next year or two. Behind them are 60 very young startups, in which we are just starting regular activities. Every year, some companies from the third group become “candidates”, and we launch 10-15 more novice startups.

In Russia, it is believed that the conveyor turns people into non-humans, but I think that the opposite is true. When Henry Ford created the automobile assembly line, he multiplied labor productivity and therefore could pay his employees more than other companies. More importantly, the conveyor gave work to people who did not know the secrets of craftsmanship - those who did not have a special education, but wanted to work, got a chance. We're doing the same thing with entrepreneurship - open access to the construction of technology companies for those people who are capable of hard work, but do not consider themselves natural business geniuses.

Why would novice entrepreneurs waste years of their lives mining the knowledge necessary for a decent start of a new business? We are building companies in a dozen new industries and therefore spend hundreds of thousands of hours a year collectively analyzing markets and technologies. No single newcomer will be able to catch up and overtake us - but by opening new startups, we give entrepreneurs the opportunity to immediately take the first step, and not run after the train.

What is Technospark

The company was founded in 2012 by a group of entrepreneurs and the Fund for Infrastructure and educational programs(part of the RUSNANO group) for the mass creation of technological start-ups in the hardware industries. Technospark is not an incubator and does not issue grants, but it builds new technology businesses from scratch. Today, more than 100 companies simultaneously grow at the site in Troitsk, which are engaged in the development and production of high-tech products and services - from logistics robots to solar roofs. In early May, Technospark, together with partners from a network of nanotechnology centers (Saransk, Ulyanovsk, St. Petersburg, Novosibirsk and Tomsk), announced the Business Debut 2018-2019 program - a large-scale recruitment of young entrepreneurs into new startups and a 10-month "combat » practice in a real business environment. Debutants will take the positions of business builders in 100 new technology companies created by Technospark and a network of nanocenters. Each startup will be invested 1 million rubles of investments to create its first product and to pay salaries to debutants. Those of them who achieve obvious results in 10 months will be able to become co-shareholders of a startup.

Small market - big ambitions

Despite the large investments, Russian scientific developments are almost not subject to monetization - the reason is that the tasks for the development are set by scientists, not entrepreneurs. For example, for the first 2-3 years we were very fond of lasers: Troitsk is almost the most "laser" city in the country, there are three dozen scientific groups that deal with this topic. We thought it was the Klondike! There is definitely something for business! But from the old backlog, only one worthy business was found - lasers in ophthalmology.

We regularly buy and transfer global technologies to Russia. Even despite the sanctions. In the fall of 2014, at the peak of the foreign policy crisis, we agreed with our Belgian and Dutch R&D partners on one of our companies becoming one of the owners of a package of advanced technologies for surface-integrated photovoltaics. Today we make joint products using this intellectual property with several large Russian companies and preparing for the construction of the first production of solar roofs.

In California alone, there are an order of magnitude more tech companies that buy products from other tech companies than in Russia. But this only forces us to immediately build export-oriented businesses. For example, we have a company that develops and manufactures logistics robots (these are self-propelled carts that travel along warehouses, transport goods and replace people) - it has production both in Russia and in northern Europe. Both here and there have their advantages: it is cheaper in Russia work force and some other items of expenditure, in Europe - the contract infrastructure is better developed and there are an order of magnitude more customers per square kilometer.

We will never be interested in cryptocurrencies, media, social networks, fintech - purely IT solutions: 75% of all new companies in the world are concentrated there and competition is a thousand times higher than in the remaining 25%. If I make robots, I know all my competitors. And if I did a social network, then I would have thousands of competitors - I can’t know all of them. Without knowing your niche thoroughly, it is impossible to be successful.

In any industry, there are a lot of empty niches and problems that no one solves - to see them, you have to be very "in the know". For example, 1.5 years ago, our biotechnology group created a startup that creates a technology for express diagnostics of well waters for oil industry. The bottom line is this: the older the well, the more bacteria in its waters that spoil the equipment. To suppress bacteria, regular diagnostics are needed - today it takes more than a week, since it is done in special laboratories, which means that during these weeks and months the equipment deteriorates intensively. We develop a solution for diagnostics right on the well. "From the street" this problem - and a chance for business - can not be seen.

Business can be built only on those technologies that reduce the cost of the product. For example, over the past 10 years, the cost of metal 3D printing has decreased several times and the modeling and 3D design processes have accelerated, which allowed us to create TENmedprint, a company that prints individual titanium endoprostheses. If you do not know for sure to what extent a particular technology is ready for industrial use and how much more needs to be invested in it, it is impossible to make an entrepreneurial calculation.

Build a company - sell a company

We are building dozens of companies in parallel so that we can sell them as soon as we are ready. Look at the statistics of M&A transactions in the world - their number is growing every year by tens of percent. And although this market is still quite young, it is already safe to say that technology startups are a super-demand commodity. Technospark and a network of nanocenters have sold dozens of technology start-ups over the past 2 years. These were young companies created by us in Novosibirsk, Tomsk, Ulyanovsk, Kazan, Saransk, Troitsk, Dubna, St. Petersburg. Young, but already rated by buyers. For example, the company NCL, which makes a laser medical puncher, was bought out by our partners and co-investors who invested in it at the start.

Our main clients are growing corporations: for them, buying startups is one of the most effective development tools. Instead of building a new technology business yourself, it is much more profitable to buy a company that an entrepreneur has grown.

Our investment opportunities have always been quite modest - that's why we figured out how to build hardware startups for millions of rubles, and not for millions of dollars. How long does it take to build a worthwhile business in the hard-ware industries from scratch? 15-20 years. Our goal is to cut this period in half. If this is done, then at the same time the size of investments will be reduced by several times. In terms of complexity, this is how to reduce the construction period of a nuclear power plant from 8 years to 48 months.

Time is the only irreplaceable, and therefore the most monetized resource. Even if you are not going to sell your company, its current value is exactly what a potential buyer is willing to pay. How much time this purchase will save him - a year, five or ten years - that's how much he will pay.

Building a successful technology company using new engineering inventions and being able to sell it - in real life, such painstaking work takes years and costs a lot. Is it possible to understand how this path works and assess your readiness to create a new technology business in just a few hours? It is possible, says Denis Kovalevich, shareholder and CEO of the Troitsk Nanocenter Technospark, which according to the results of 2016 became the best in the National Rating of Technoparks. He told ITMO.NEWS how even first-year students will be able to try their hand at creating a new industry from scratch, what the first interuniversity venture nanocenter in Russia will do, and why creating 150 high-tech companies a year is quite realistic.

Denis Kovalevich, shareholder and CEO of the Troitsk Nanocenter Technospark

Already on February 21 and 22 at ITMO University, shareholders and heads of nanocenters will recruit to the club of the interuniversity venture building nanocenter. The event will be held in the format of the business game “Build a company. Sell ​​the company” — students will create their own invention from the simplest materials and build a company, which they will then try to sell. The scriptwriter of the game is Denis Kovalevich, a shareholder and head of the Troitsk Nanocenter Technospark.

Denis, please tell us how the game was created, and what should those who dare to participate and try to build their own company prepare for next Tuesday?

The game "Build a company. Sell ​​the company” we created at the beginning of last year. Her the main objective- teach us to analyze own abilities and ways of thinking, to evaluate whether they are suitable or not for technology entrepreneurship. We specifically chose the form of the game, because it is the game that allows you to live through relatively safe material that experience that in real life is expensive, takes years and always has real consequences. In the game, all this is compensated and compressed into an ultra-short period.

After the game was developed in this version, we adapted it for students so that young guys could also try themselves, participate in the process of creating a new industry. I note that this is the essence of the game - the creation of a new industry from scratch and the opportunity to try yourself inside this industry in different qualities. For example, participants will be able to be entrepreneurs who create companies and then prepare them for sale and sell them, or take other positions such as engineers who work with entrepreneurs and create new developments or produce technological products.

In the second half of last year, we held a whole series of games with students, and it showed extremely high efficiency. The game found an active response from the students, and many of those who played ended up in our personnel reserve. When they graduate and are ready to start working as entrepreneurs with us, in our technology companies, we will be open.

During the game, the leaders of the nanocenters are planning to enroll in the club of the interuniversity venture nanocenter. What is this organization and what will it do?

The decision to create an interuniversity venture building nanotechnology center was made last year. "Interuniversity" in this case means cooperation between two partners - St. Petersburg Polytechnic University and ITMO University. At the same time, in this story it is completely clear that where there are two, there are more. In the future, the Club will also be open to other universities, both St. Petersburg and Russian universities in general. And this game, which will take place at ITMO University in the near future, will be the beginning of the formation of a club for the nanocenter being created.

What is a club and why is it needed? This is a platform open to everyone: both freshmen-bachelors and masters who complete their studies. The fact is that at this stage, the guys will be able, firstly, to understand more about how entrepreneurs and engineers work in business through the game. Secondly, to try on a new model for both Russia and the world of serial technological entrepreneurship, or venture building, as it is more accurately called. In the event that the fitting takes place, if “the suit fits” or if they understand that it can suit them in the future, they will be able to stay inside this club movement that we are launching, and then go further and take steps into a specific business.

We, in turn, are ready to open part of our entrepreneurial “kitchen” to a wide audience: how operating entrepreneurs tell how we create companies, what technologies we use, and so on. If the guys associate themselves with this, then we just tell them: “OK, there are ways to become a part of this work.”

Can this form of dialogue be called unique for our country?

I think that this is generally the first business club of its kind in Russia, the first club created in connection with professional activity on serial technological entrepreneurship. There are various fairly formal near-state associations of already solid businessmen, and our club is something exactly the opposite. This is a platform for different guys - maybe they are doing some kind of business while still studying at the university, or they are just thinking about it and don’t know where to start, maybe these are engineers who work inside such entrepreneurial projects, and not inside large government agencies or corporations. And now they have a place where they can communicate, get a unique and so far inaccessible experience of building their own technology company, which appears in people over the years, as they say, at their fingertips.

As for the entrepreneurial "kitchen" and the current state of the system of Russian nanocenters... In December last year, the Association of Clusters and Technoparks summed up the results of the II National Rating of technoparks in Russia. More than 100 technoparks across the country were considered, after which 25 best ones were selected, and as a result, the Troitsk Nanocenter became the leader of the rating « Technospark» . What made you successful?

Denis Kovalevich is an entrepreneur and CEO Trinity Nanotechnology Center Technospark, which launches dozens of new technological startups every year, - told Snob what large corporations pay builders of new companies for, why it is important to be able to copy and what engineers of the 19th century had, what engineers lack today

Ɔ. We communicate with you at the site of one of your companies, directly at the production site. And around us are all these installations that appeared thanks to the talent of engineers. And I have a question: what kind of engineer is he today?

I think most people think that an engineer is a genius called to invent one unique thing that will be the best in the world. This idea of ​​an engineer has a long history and its heroes, such as, for example, Leonardo da Vinci. For me, as an entrepreneur, the key role of an engineer is to create more and more economical technologies and solutions, reducing the amount of energy consumed every day. technological processes resources, time spent and, therefore, reducing the cost of the product. I recently clashed on this issue with school teachers - this happened, most likely, because any teacher dreams of producing a Nobel laureate. And not someone who will painstakingly work on productivity. In this sense, for me, an engineer is someone who works for Ford.

Ɔ. And invents a conveyor.

And he figured out how to make a car for 300 dollars, while in the market at the beginning of the 20th century there were cars for only 3,000 and in the amount of several thousand pieces a year. In the third year after the assembly line was launched, Ford produced a million cars. And you and I are only able to buy a car because Ford made this entrepreneurial revolution in automotive technology.

Ɔ. That is, we need a person who must combine the ability to design with economic knowledge.

In the 19th century, engineers in Russia understood what I am saying now much better than today's engineers, who were formed in the Soviet system. Because engineers then worked in partnership with entrepreneurs. Together they built the industry of pre-revolutionary Russia - one of the most developed in the world at that time. And then the partnership fell apart.

I devoted seven years to work at the state corporation Rosatom, whose institutes employ more than 20,000 people. These are scientists and engineers who are very good at doing unique things, but who find it extremely difficult to reduce the cost of a product and increase labor productivity.

Ɔ. In general, they say on the world market: if you want to get a unique thing, turn to the Russians, if you want to get a lot of the same things, turn to anyone, but not to the Russians. What is your understanding of entrepreneurship in Russia?

My parents are originally two atomic physicists who went into business in the early 1990s.

Elena Nikolaeva Photo: Tatiana Hesso

Ɔ. And I have. Physicists-mathematicians. Mom is now in the banking sector, dad was an entrepreneur. And when dad went into business, former colleagues at research institutes said ...

Commerce, merchant.

Ɔ. Trader, yes.

This attitude towards entrepreneurship is the standard of the society in which we now live. But at the same time there is a completely different attitude, because we all know Henry Ford, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk. And even those who criticize entrepreneurs, calling them “commerce” and “trader”, these people are treated with respect. In this sense, society lives in a state of ongoing schizophrenia.

Ɔ. However, I note that after a quarter of a century, many physicists are returning to science.

Yes, but mostly in a different role. My parents returned to technology activities, but already in an entrepreneurial position. In my opinion, today we are only just beginning to see the sprouts of what is generally called the technology business. After the breakdown of the planned production chains of the USSR, the first wave of entrepreneurs gathered them again, they became owners of enterprises due to the intermediary-restorative type of entrepreneurship, and formed large industrial conglomerates. And only in recent years, new technology companies have begun to appear that earn not on old assets, but on the fact that they make their product or service faster and better than anyone else in the country or in the world. Here we are, at Technospark, trying to carry out such an operation with the very process of creating startups. We are trying to build startups cheaper and faster than anyone else.

Ɔ. Are you actually an accelerator?

No, we are a business of building businesses. We are a partnership between a group of private entrepreneurs, of which I am one, and the Fund for Infrastructure and Educational Programs (part of the RUSNANO Group). In Technospark, responsibility for business lies with private partners. Now you are in the territory of private enterprise. And here are about 100 companies created from scratch over the past 4 years. That is, we start building 20-25 new companies a year.

Denis Kovalevich Photo: Tatiana Hesso

Ɔ. How do you open them?

Five years ago there was a field of dandelions here. We started building it from scratch. For the first year and a half, we created a significant part of new companies - 30-40 percent - together with Troitsk entrepreneurs who were once engineers and scientists in our institutes. Conditionally, let's call it spin-offs from the Research Institute. By the end of the fourth year of operation, the percentage of such companies in our portfolio had dropped to about 10%.

Ɔ. That is, they were engineers who had already begun to commercialize their product.

Yes. For example, our partner in the market of medical and industrial lasers is the Troitskaya company Optosystems, founded by Sergey Vartapetov, one of the best laser scientists in the country. When we started a partnership with her, she already supplied 50% of ophthalmic lasers to Russian clinics. Together we made a new generation femtosecond laser that allows you to perform eye surgery without damaging the outer layers of the cornea. Only two or three companies in the world have such technology.

Ɔ. And here the question arises. Like a scientist, a developer becomes an entrepreneur. What is happening to him at this moment?

There are at least two things going on. First, he alienates what he has developed, technology, from himself, transfers it to the company and ceases to treat this technology as his own. A particular technology is always a changeable element within a business. The second is the transition from the desire to do something unique to the fact that your development will be profitable only if you continuously increase labor productivity, that is, reduce the cost of this product.

Ɔ. Can this be learned?

The question in philosophical language sounds like this: can someone convey to someone else, than he already has, a picture of the world?

Ɔ. When you and I watch a film, we somehow accept the director's picture of the world.

It's true. By the way, Hollywood's contribution to the establishment of entrepreneurship in the United States as a recognized activity with the presumption that the entrepreneur - the key engine of the economy - is gigantic. In our country, the consensus so far is the opposite: any entrepreneur, especially those working in partnership with state-owned companies or institutions, is a potential suspect.

Denis Kovachevich, Elena Nikolaeva Photo: Tatiana Hesso

Ɔ. That is, the process of changing public opinion is man-made. Is it called propaganda?

In my opinion, meanings and pictures of the world are much better transmitted through families. For example, if a million people in our country over the past century had left their descendants entrepreneurial capital, family businesses, or just the experience of such work, then the attitude towards the contribution of entrepreneurs to the national welfare would be completely different.

Ɔ. We seem to have businesses in the country - maybe the issue of succession in them is complicated, but one way or another it is on the agenda.

For the most part, these are structures that are inseparable from their creators - they are extremely tied to them. Those who try to turn these structures into real companies, that is, businesses that can work without their founders, face enormous problems. Plus, in most companies, technology is so outdated that it is cheaper to build a new one than to upgrade an old one. You know, as one older friend of mine says, an injection into the prosthesis will not help.

Ɔ. How were other Technospark startups formed?

The second third of companies is copying. I don't know about you, but I think the ability to copy is one of the highest skills you can have.

Ɔ. Steal like an artist.

The main thing is not that the idea should be "one's own", but that it should be appropriate. The question "whose is she?" It doesn't matter to the entrepreneur. For example, we launched a logistics robot company in 2014 after we saw that this market was starting to open up. We saw that the company that developed and started producing these robots was bought by Amazon for almost $800 million.

Ɔ. And they have small-capacity robots.

Yes. Our company develops two lines of robots. One is heavy, which holds one and a half tons, and their deliveries will begin in a year. And the second up to 300 kg. The reality is that today Amazon and other retailers are losing billions of dollars a year in inventory. The only way to reduce these losses is to rebuild the warehouses with robots. We founded this company because we knew for sure that there are at least 5, 6, maybe 10 places in the world for such businesses. And they started to create a company for the development and production of robots from scratch.

Denis Kovalevich Photo: Tatiana Hesso

Ɔ. Does it make sense to start from scratch? Have you looked at what is already on the market?

From scratch, this means from the decision that the company will make such a logistics robot that can achieve a relatively low cost and which can be produced in quantities of tens of thousands of pieces per year and more. Because if you make a robot that can be produced in the amount of 1000 a year, nobody needs it. And the robot must also be designed so that its parts can be produced at those operating in Russia and in the world. production facilities. Otherwise, additional investments in production assets will be needed and the product will again become too expensive. Plus, we have a separate company that integrates various robots into warehouse solutions.

Ɔ. There must be a third part. Do you have to have engineering, service all over the world?

100 percent. But in entrepreneurship, it is important not only not to miss something, but also not to start too early. Now engineering and service is the responsibility of a company that deals with warehouse solutions. As soon as the situation matures, we will highlight maintenance and service robots in separate view business.

Ɔ. What then is the last type of company in Technospark?

The last 30% are our own bold hypotheses about what technology businesses make sense to build.

Ɔ. How did you define areas of focus? Where do you get the hypothesis about the demanded businesses in the future?

There is no problem in generating hypotheses - everyone who does something always has an abundance of ideas about new businesses. The difficulty is to implement them in time. The English economist William Jevons wrote 140 years ago that an entrepreneur carries out un-investment, that is, in Russian, uninvestment. And he also said that every entrepreneur has a time limit for this very investment. Either you managed to realize a chance - in a limited time and using a limited amount of capital - or you did not. An entrepreneur is someone who answers the question of what is economically meaningful and appropriate to do today. In a sense, this is the question large and mid-sized tech corporations are paying to answer when they buy young startups. By the way, in 2017, for the first time, the share of purchases of young technology startups in the global volume of mergers and acquisitions exceeded 50%. Back in 2012, they were 25%. And in the 90s there were a few percent.

Elena Nikolaeva Photo: Tatiana Hesso

Ɔ. What is it connected with?

Roughly speaking, entrepreneurship has been divided into two parts - the work of growing companies from scratch to the point of their objective readiness for sale, and the work of growing and "exploiting" already established companies. Decent today global companies prefer not to hire a new vice president or create a new division within themselves to start a new direction. They instruct their corporate venture fund to start buying in such and such a market such and such a number of startups per year.

Ɔ. To what extent does Russia fit into world statistics?

Russia's share in this section of world statistics is still almost imperceptible. Over the previous three years, from 2014 to 2016, the entire network of nanotechnology centers, one of which is Technospark, sold about 30 young start-up companies. At the same time, we deal only with hard-weir - this is clear from our status as a "nanotechnological center". If we are engaged in software, then only integrated into the hardware. And these 30 companies in three years are almost 75% of the entire Russian market for sales of start-ups in material-based industries. About the same number of IT startups were sold.

Ɔ. However, there is movement. This is a government decree to open venture corporate funds did that work?

It hasn't worked yet, but I hope it will. Now we have three types of buyers. The first is Russian private equity funds that invest in scaling the business of startups we have created. The second is foreign companies localized in the Russian market, for which this practice is already part of their business culture. And the third type is entrepreneurs with whom we once created joint companies and who buy out our share.

Ɔ. What other bright projects do you have here?

Behind you are working installations in which artificial diamonds grow. These units are not only among the highest quality in the world, but also among the fastest and cheapest - due to our and our partners' investments in increasing the productivity and speed of their work.

Ɔ. Where are artificial diamonds used?

For example, in special optics. Where glass cannot withstand power, such as laser radiation, and glass needs to be replaced with a more durable material. The material that can be made transparent is diamond. At the exit from the installation, it is black, and polished with an accuracy of 2 nanometers of roughness becomes transparent. Such an industrial product. Another example is our company, which produces systems for the accumulation and storage of electricity.

Denis Kovalevich Photo: Tatiana Hesso

Ɔ. In the field of alternative energy?

While the Russian market of surface-integrated photovoltaics lags behind the pace of development of storage systems, but in the end, yes, there will be a photovoltaic roof, facade, window that collect solar energy during the day, the battery stores it, and in the evenings it gives out and turns on your washing machine in automatic mode.

Ɔ. You have a wide range of activities.

Yes. We are also building, for example, a group of companies in the field of genetics. Genetics in world medicine today is, first of all, the refinement of the treatment plan. Standard diagnostics tells the patient: a) that he has cancer; b) names a specific organ. And that's it. But there are dozens behind this diagnosis. different types diseases under the general name of "cancer", and at the same time there are already hundreds of drugs that can overcome it - but not any, but a specific type of cancer. All over the world, genetic contracting companies receive examination results from doctors on a traditional medical equipment and a sample of the patient's DNA, and give back its transcript. And the doctor, on the basis of this, selects a specific drug that will work.

Ɔ. To what extent is such interaction integrated into the healthcare system?

Almost nothing. This is a significant change in the structure of the division of labor in the medical market, plus the retraining of doctors. Few doctors today know how to work with the information that they can get from geneticists.

Ɔ. Who should tune the links? What can and should such a structural player as the state do?

My answer will seem banal to you. The main thing is not to interfere with the development of genetics and the work of geneticists with physicians.

Ɔ. I'm sorry, but it seems to me that it is wrong to stand in such a position. The state still has to do its part: set up the infrastructure, remove the chains of intermediaries, eliminate the absurdity and free interpretation of laws. Don't you think so?

Yes, you are right, of course. And in the retraining of staff, too, can participate.

Ɔ. Do you and the Fund for Infrastructure and Educational Programs somehow influence education in schools? To get specialists out of there for new technologies?

You asked the question very accurately, because we work primarily with schoolchildren, and not with students. Since the construction of any new company in our areas takes 10-15 years - this is our operational planning horizon - the question of who will work here in 10-15 years is also very specific for us. These are the guys who are now in the fifth-eighth grade of the school.

Ɔ. How do you interact with them?

We are not the Ministry of Education and cannot change the system. We are building a block of additional training near the schools. Two thousand children pass through our playgrounds here and in the city center every year. Excursions, workshops, engaging shows, summer schools, even project work.

Ɔ. What do you teach?

Of course, we introduce children to the technologies that we ourselves deal with. But most importantly, we are trying to convey to schoolchildren the “feeling of work” – the ability to work with high productivity every day. Unfortunately, the level of devaluation of attitudes towards long and repeated work is catastrophic. This is a larger problem than finding markets, capital or anything else. We teach schoolchildren to complete what they start, we instill skills to save resources.

Ɔ. Does it make sense for Russia as a whole to concentrate on something specific or does it need to go to all areas at once?

This is the cornerstone question. My point of view as an entrepreneur is maximum specialization. It only makes sense to do what you can – at least potentially – be able to do more economically and productively than others.

Ɔ. For example?

In all areas that Technospark is engaged in, we see such an opportunity - a multiple increase in productivity and by opening up new markets. Old industries will not help the country's economy grow, new ones are needed. I think there is a chance that 100 years after the revolution, the economy of our country will restore its movement towards working in global markets, and not slide into another autarky. And technological entrepreneurs will “choose” these very new industries with their actions - this is their main role in the economy, in my opinion. You see, I can only earn money if I correctly answer the question “what to do?”. This is my function as an entrepreneur and at the same time my motivation.
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