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In the western outskirts of Moscow, a complex of colorful buildings stand out in the snow-clad wilderness. Inside the buildings, people are engrossed in what they called innovation.
It is the Skolkovo Innovation Center, a high-tech park of 23,000 square meters created on the initiative of then Russian President Dmitry Medvedev in 2010. It is also known as Russia's "Silicon Valley".
Russia has long been successful in science and technology development, with a long list of Nobel Prize winners in the field. Facing the tide of dazzling technological innovations in the digital era, the country sees no reason for it to be left behind.
In April 2010, Medvedev ordered to work out legal, administrative, tax and customs regulations on the project, which finally brought about a series of preferential policies the center now enjoys.
The innovation city boasts strong support from the Russian federal budget. Tax holidays are granted for start-ups in the science park and visa policies are eased for foreign technological specialists.
Skolkovo commits itself to the combination of innovative ideas and their commercialization. To that end, it has built cooperative relationship with a number of world-renowned universities and companies.
In June 2011, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Russia's Skolkovo Foundation signed an agreement on building the Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology (SIST). MIT promised to assist the Skolkovo Foundation in building SIST as a "unique, world-class" graduate research institute.
In the same year, Skolkovo struck a deal with the U.S. IT giant IBM on opening an IBM research and development center in the science park.
"Our aim is to build a system of support for any idea from the moment they appear in a researcher's head and to make it a reality," Vasily Belov, senior vice president of Skolkovo Foundation, told Xinhua.
Their efforts were greeted with encouraging numbers.
"In 2014, we see that our companies earned over 30 billion rubles by selling their solutions to customers home and abroad, and over 1,000 patents have been applied in the year," Belov said. The ruble traded at around 48 against the U.S. dollar in early November, 2014.
"Some 20 foreign companies have planned to open their research centers in Skolkovo, and about 60 start-ups have foreign founders from the U.S., Europe, Japan and Singapore," Belov added.
It is hardly avoidable to draw a parallel between Skolkovo and the Silicon Valley in California, the United States.
"The Silicon Valley is a very attractive place, and we ought to use the entrepreneurship of the Silicon Valley founders to teach our scientists to be entrepreneurs too," said Renat Batyrov, CEO of Skolkovo Techonopark.
Meanwhile, Batyrov believes Skolkovo has its own advantages.
"We have the government support and a very big pool of scientists. Also, competition at our market is not too fierce so far," he said.
Skolkovo also shows no hesitation in cooperation with Chinese partners.
In the year of 2012, a delegation of Skolkovo visited China's Zhongguancun Science Park in Beijing and the two sides discussed the possibility of cooperation.
"We have very much in common. We both attract talents from across the country and help them enter domestic and international markets," said Batyrov.
In October 2014, China and Russia signed a memorandum to jointly build high-tech parks in each other's country.
As part of China's revival of the "Silk Road", the high-tech parks are being developed by the Russian Direct Investment Fund , Russia-China Investment Fund, the Skolkovo Fund, and the local government of northwest China's Shaanxi Province.
"Chinese market is vast and the most promising among emerging economies," said Dmitry Khan, partner of Dauria Aerospace, a satellite manufacturing company in Skolkovo which are working with Chinese partners to develop advanced satellite solutions for civilian use. Enditem
