Contest to choose Belarusian startups for Russian investments in Minsk on 14-15 April

A stage of the All-Russian Startup Tour will take place in Minsk on 14-15 April. This year for the first time the event will be held beyond Russian borders, BelTA learned from the press service of the Skolkovo Foundation, which organizes the startup tour.

A contest to choose projects will be the central part of the Minsk stage of the startup tour. The projects will target information technologies, biological and medical technologies, energy-effective technologies, industrial technologies and materials, innovations for children. Both legal persons and natural persons — small innovation companies, research teams, individual scientists, university students, and entrepreneurs — are invited to take part in the contest. Projects at any stage of their development — from an idea to a finished product — will be accepted for consideration.

Participants of the startup tour will be able present their projects before experts and potential investors. There are plans to nominate five winners in each of the previously mentioned five areas. Apart from prizes from partners and co-organizers the winners will get invitations to participate in Russia’s largest startup conference Startup Village that will take place at premises of the Skolkovo Foundation in Moscow on 2-3 June 2015. The Minsk stage of the startup tour will also include master classes by the leading specialists in the area of the implementation of innovative projects, seminars and training sessions.

The Minsk stage of the All-Russian Startup Tour will be held with assistance of the State Science and Technology Committee of Belarus. The Minsk City Technopark is a co-organizer.

Minsk will be the tenth city to host the 2015 All-Russian Startup Tour. Before coming to the Belarusian capital the road show will visit Rostov-on-Don, Tomsk, Nizhny Novgorod, Kazan, Almaty, Saint Petersburg, Vladivostok, Krasnoyarsk, and Yekaterinburg.

The advancement of the 2015 All-Russian Startup Tour beyond Russian borders and into member states of the Eurasian Economic Union is a logical continuation of the project, noted Vice Premier of Russia Arkady Dvorkovich. He went on saying: “While taking care of tasks concerning Eurasian economic integration and the formation of the Single Economic Space, we should clearly understand that the creation of a single innovation space should become an integral part of integration processes. Progress in the 21st century is possible only through the development of high technologies. In this field we can give a lot to each other. We can enable tight cooperation between our scientists, developers, entrepreneurs and investors, who could work together to advance innovative technologies and offer them to the markets of the Eurasian Economic Union and the entire world. This year’s startup tour can become an important step in this direction. It will contribute to the formation of stable ties between the innovation communities of Russia, Kazakhstan, and Belarus. I am confident that next year the startup tour will move on to Armenia and Kyrgyzstan.”

The All-Russian Startup Tour is designed to find innovative products that will sell well on high-tech markets in addition to helping young developers plan their own growth strategy. The formation of innovation communities is an important task of the startup tour. The communities are meant to include everyone related to innovations such as personnel of research institutions, university students and professors, entrepreneurs that represent small, medium, and large high-tech business, venture investors, representatives of government agencies.