' -- they simply know nothing about them'
http://www.eenews.net/stories/1060010341 For Russia's young entrepreneurs, sanctions are just another obstacle David Ferris December 11, 2014 [image / Bravo Motors http://www.eenews.net/image_assets/2014/12/image_asset_9206.jpg Konstantin Artemev, the founder of Bravo Motors, stands at the Moscow Open Innovations conference with his electric three-wheeler ] The Bravo eGo is the rarest of things -- an electric car made in Russia -- and it is raised on a dais at a big technology conference in Moscow. The company's young founder, Konstantin Artemev, opens the gull-wing door and lets a guest climb in. It has three wheels and a single front seat and not much else. When Artemev gingerly slams the door shut, it is confined like the cockpit of a fighter jet. Instead of pedals and a steering wheel, there's a joystick. Making an electric car in Russia would seem an exercise in Dostoevskian suffering, especially as Western sanctions take hold and the economy teeters on recession. But as he discusses the car's features, Artemev, 28, is possessed of the kind of unshakable confidence usually found in Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. One look around the cavernous hall shows he is not alone. The October conference, called Open Innovations, teemed with a sort of Russian that Americans don't hear much about: the young technology entrepreneur. Specialists in biomedicine and Big Data hurried about, along with the occasional robot. They frequent Moscow and St. Petersburg and are rapidly learning to speak the language of valuations, exits and venture capital. (Full disclosure: The Russian government, which sponsored the conference, provided flights and lodging for this reporter to moderate a session.) Many have a level of technical and scientific competence that is at least equal to that in the United States. They are connected by many of the same social networks Americans use, and are pouring their hearts into creating apps and machines that their counterparts in the West haven't heard of -- at least not yet. "It's totally different" than the generation that came of age under the Soviet Union, said Alex Bochkarev, who had a booth at the conference promoting his 360-degree cameras, designed by optics experts in Moscow. "People are thinking globally rather than locally; they want to build huge companies like Facebook or Apple. Many people have a dream of starting their own company instead of working for a large corporation." But to become full members of the high-tech global economy, they must overcome a daunting set of hurdles. First is [ ... political ... ] This generation is coming of age at a difficult time. The next Russian tragedy may be that, just as these young technologists are primed to reach out to the West, the West is recoiling from them. Except for a few Americans who are doing just the opposite. Defying the Soviet stereotype Artemev, a computer scientist and tinkerer, found his inspiration in the U.S. electric automaker Tesla. His take is an electric trike that could help young professionals dodge through Moscow's horrible traffic. It folds into an even tinier formation when parked, and the "dashboard" is the driver's digital tablet, tucked into a bag as he or she walks away. "At some moment, I understand this is the future that I want to participate in and that I want to help to create," Artemev said. That feeling seems to be common among Russia's young tech entrepreneurs. At the same time, they are, like Artemev's car, still kind of amateur. They don't quite know how to do it. "Russia always was famous for a lot of talented people and a lot of great ideas and great technological implementation," Artemev said later on the phone, with his impressive command of English. "But the problem is that Russians, in the historical perspective, are not such good marketers as good technicians. We can create great things, but we can't sell them." The young generation of entrepreneurs abroad in Russia's cities confound a lot of the ideas Americans have about Russians. Among a people known for their tragic sense of fatalism, they are optimistic they can create the next Uber. In a country known for its insularity, they are making detailed plans for entering European and American markets. With a government that often seems to repress every impulse -- Russia's most celebrated techie, Pavel Durov, fled the country after his company was seized by Putin's allies -- they are grateful that in other ways the government actually seems to be helping. A hero among the digerati is Dmitry Medvedev, the prime minister, who headlined the conference. He is seen as one who "gets" technology, especially compared with Putin, who is more of an oil and gas man. Before leaving the presidency in 2012, Medvedev pushed through legislation to encourage venture capital investment and established technology venture funds. A surprising fact: Russia has been vaulting up the World Bank's Doing Business index, which tracks how easy it is to open and run a local business. Two years ago, Russia ranked 112th; now it's No. 62. The Russian word for startup ... came into circulation just a few years ago. At the conference, the young businesspeople, many of them women, attended master classes by Silicon Valley venture capitalists on how to write business plans, raise financing and do public relations. Still, it was evident that ties with the West were under strain. Many venture firms had already stepped back their commitments to Russia, and last year's conference partners, Finland and France, had been replaced this year by China. The Aeroflot plane from Washington, D.C., was mostly empty. Russian startups have a steep learning curve in a country where, for decades under the Soviet command economy, what you got was what you got. No one needed to sell anything. They have difficulty even making products that are desirable to their fellow Russians. The customer service problem It is an experience felt personally by Artemev, who started out five years ago making electric golf carts. Early on, Bravo Motors scored a relationship with a major golf cart dealer in Moscow and branched out into making other kinds of vehicles, including miniature London-style double-decker buses for children to trundle around the mall. But then it came up against some bracing realities. "In Russia, there are cheap products from China" -- 90 percent of the market, Artemev said -- "or expensive products from Europe and the U.S. People prefer one or the other. Somehow, we found ourselves in between." After selling only about 20 golf carts, Artemev has turned toward a larger but exponentially harder market: street-legal electric cars. Russians who can afford a car usually hunger for the large, luxury, foreign variety, not a minuscule domestic. Russians don't distrust electric cars -- they simply know nothing about them, Artemev said. Gas is cheap and is only getting cheaper, which is causing Russia's oil-exporting economy to falter. Meanwhile, the falling ruble is making it more expensive for Artemev to import his Chinese-made batteries and electric motors. He wants to avoid the fate of Russia's other, more well-known foray into low-carbon vehicles, a hybrid carmaker founded by celebrity entrepreneur Mikhail Prokhorov. After taking more than 200,000 advance orders, the company was sold earlier this year to the government for €1 ($1.24). Artemev has also had trouble finding employees who want to work as hard as he does. That is a problem for workaholic CEOs everywhere, but may be an especially thorny one in Russia. One entrepreneur said, during a late-night drive in Moscow, that the hardest task was finding among his fellow Russians a customer-first attitude. Most potential employees were brusque or even rude. That makes it hard to fashion a product that delights, like an iPhone or a Tesla. A small evidence of that difficulty could be found in the back seat of Artemev's car. To call it cramped would be an understatement. It actually had no legroom at all -- the leg edge of the seat simply merged with the rear of the front one. (The newest model has a 10-centimeter gap.) Asked about this legless seat, Artemev explained is was intended for "a child." His lips twisted into a grin. "Or a little girlfriend." An American in Moscow In August, President Obama created a minor stir with a comment that "Russia doesn't make anything." Critics noted that Russia does in fact make some very nice things, including the rockets that carry American astronauts to the International Space Station. But back on Earth, it is often true. Skoltech The Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology is envisioned as the gleaming center of "Russia's Silicon Valley." Photo courtesy of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A citizen of the global economy can put on a robe made in China and sip from a Swiss coffee maker, use a Korean phone to check a social network founded in California, and drive to work in a German car, without once touching anything Russian. Why is Russia -- the world's largest country and eighth-largest economy, with some of the most talented scientists -- so absent from the global economy? An interesting perspective comes from Keith Stevenson, another attendee of the Russian tech conference. He is a 48-year-old chemistry professor at the University of Texas, Austin. A man with warm brown eyes and a friendly face, he has earned a reputation for mentoring young scientists. In June, as Ukrainian and Russian proxy forces engaged in heavy fighting, he arrived in Moscow as an emissary for a new form of collaboration between Russia and the United States. Stevenson is on a three-year assignment as a professor at the Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology, or Skoltech, a new university being built on the southwest outskirts of Moscow with grand ambitions. Lavished with $1 billion in government and corporate funding -- its architects are Herzog & de Meuron, a celebrated firm that designed the main stadium for the 2008 Olympic Games in China -- Skoltech aims to have as many academics as the California Institute of Technology by the end of the decade. It is being built alongside a high-tech business park, and the two together are sometimes referred to as "Russia's Silicon Valley." The official language of Skoltech is English. Skoltech's founding partner is the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which in 2011 signed an agreement to collaborate on everything from designing buildings and lab spaces to hiring faculty to writing curriculum, according to Bruce Tidor, MIT's faculty leader of the project. Stevenson is a key hire. His job is to head up the center for electrochemical energy storage. Energy storage is a red-hot area of research these days, where breakthroughs could enable electric cars, renewable energy and a better-functioning electric grid. Skoltech intends to be a leader, and Stevenson said he is thrilled to have access to researchers at Moscow State University and their deep knowledge of the fundamentals of inorganic solid-state chemistry, which is crucial to the future of both batteries and fuel cells. Skoltech has already had its troubles. Last year, it was the subject of a corruption probe that turned up little, and that may have merely been a way for some opponents in the Kremlin to slow its advance. Already, Stevenson's move into his new Skoltech office has been delayed by a few months, and his salary, paid in rubles, is steadily devaluing. The ruble has dropped more than 30 percent versus the dollar since January. "I think they're very deep thinkers, and they want to do good science," Stevenson said of his new Russian colleagues. "They are almost purists in that sense. They are frustrated about technology, and they've gotten burned quite a few times, where they've counted on someone who wants to give them money and then the money goes away." Skoltech seeks to be something new in Russia, a university that turns academic inventions into commercial products. This is something even MIT has found to be difficult. But in Russia, it is next to impossible. The insurgent patent The reasons have a lot to do with patents. Inventions created by U.S. academics are usually owned by the university, and the university chooses which ones to patent and how they will be commercialized. Doing it right could earn the university and the inventor millions. But in Russia, the patents are still treated the way they were under the Soviets. They are owned by the government, which pretty much puts them in a file drawer, where they are never heard from again. "In the U.S., a patent is the first step," said Kendrick White, an American investment specialist who is working at Lobachevsky State University, east of Moscow, to reform its innovation process. "In Russia, a patent is the last step." Russian law takes a far more casual approach to intellectual property than America or Europe. Bochkarev, the maker of 360-degree cameras, said he has taken care to register his intellectual property elsewhere because Russian legislation and courts "are not perfect in this respect." [image] Keith Stevenson, a University of Texas chemistry professor at the center of a unique academic collaboration with Russia. Photo courtesy of the University of Texas, Austin. But the patent to nowhere is not the only brake on innovation for Russia's top academics. Science departments are grossly overstaffed -- hundreds of low-paid positions in a department that might merit 45 at a large Western university -- populated by the university's graduates who often have nowhere else to go. What funding there is can flow for years into research that has no commercial application, provided by government ministries that expect nothing in return but detailed reports. With no incentive to create anything, Russian researchers have become extraordinarily good at theory, but "not producing anything that benefits the gross national product," Stevenson said. White put it another way. "If I want to create something unique (in the United States), I will look for funding, will reach for the dream, will ask what research students around me are thinking, will ask, 'Is this a product? Am I going to become famous? Am I going to become rich?' In Russia, it is, 'I have this really interesting idea. If someone would just give me some money, that would be really nice.'" The new approaches at Skoltech and Lobachevsky encourage uncertain young researchers to collaborate -- something there has never been an incentive to do -- and, most importantly, the patents are by law put in the hands of the university. Whether Russia's scientists will be able to break free of their ossified system may take years to know. In the meantime, Stevenson is excited about the projects he is working on with his graduate students, including one that seeks to add an "antifreeze" of sorts to the fluids inside batteries. (The freezing of battery fluids is one of the major reason why cellphones go on the blink in Siberia.) Russia's series of tubes The October conference included a startup competition to share a $92,000 prize. In the clean tech track, the competitors' presentations were slick like those in Silicon Valley, except everyone was far better dressed. (Distressed jeans is about as informal as a young Russian entrepreneur gets.) But many of the business plans were of a very different sort than might appear at a clean tech pitch slam in California. One was Zinoferr.ru, which makes a special anti-corrosive paint for oil and gas pipes. Another was biomicrogel.com, which makes a compound that removes pollutants from wastewater and oil spills. NanoServ, the eventual clean tech winner, uses a genetically modified bacteria to clear sediment from industrial equipment. They served to make a point: In Russia, the conversation around "clean" is less about disrupting the existing order and more about incremental improvement of the dominant oil and gas industry and cleaning up decades of industrial pollution. Revenues from fossil fuels make up more than half the federal budget. Renewables such as wind and solar are barely part of the conversation. Stevenson noted that the city that Moscow most reminds him of is Houston. The concentric ring roads are beleaguered by terrible traffic, and everyone is heading to their oil jobs alone at the wheel of a big, gas-guzzling car. But no number of grim trends seem to dent the steady demeanor of Artemev. He recently found an investor, a venture capital fund from the Russian state of Mordovia, who gave between $1 million and $2 million so that manufacturing can start next year. The next model will be bigger and have windshield wipers. Soon, he will move out of his parents' house and get married. As for the obstacles, he sees them as not especially Russian, but the universal byproduct of doing something new. "Starting, starting," he said with a chuckle. "Always starting." [© eenews.net] For EVLN posts use: http://evdl.org/evln/ http://www.evdl.org/archive/index.html#nabble+template%2FNamlServlet.jtp%3Fmacro%3Dsearch_page%26node%3D413529%26query%3DEVLN%2Bbrucedp2%26days%3D0%26sort%3Ddate {brucedp.150m.com} -- View this message in context: http://electric-vehicle-discussion-list.413529.n4.nabble.com/Bravo-ru-eGo-3wheel-EV-Russians-don-t-distrust-EVs-tp4673106.html Sent from the Electric Vehicle Discussion List mailing list archive at Nabble.com. _______________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE: http://www.evdl.org/help/index.html#usub http://lists.evdl.org/listinfo.cgi/ev-evdl.org For EV drag racing discussion, please use NEDRA (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NEDRA)
