MIT Sloan Partners with Russian Nanotech Company to Help Generate Entrepreneurial Businesses

Rusnano, the Russian Corporation of Nanotechnologies, has asked the MIT Sloan School of Management to develop a customized executive education program to help it generate entrepreneurial businesses in Russia, the Financial Times reports. Rusano combines an economic development body with a venture capital firm.

Sloan's reputation for helping launch entrepreneurial ventures in the United States is part of what drew Rusnano to the Massachusetts school for its project, according to the FT. The program Sloan has developed for Rusano will feature sessions on leadership, organizational change, innovation, strategy entrepreneurship and how to commercialize innovation.

Specifically, Rusnano needs to learn how innovations get matched with market opportunities, according to Noubar Afeyan, a senior lecturer at MIT and one of the instructors in the program. "The country has no prior examples of this kind of innovation," he told the FT. "They're learning on the fly and there are significant government and legal constraints. It's easy to be skeptical but it's not productive. The most they can do is learn, adapt and experiment."

According to the FT report, Rusnano has up to $10 billion in government funds to co-invest in areas such as solar energy, composite materials, nano-biotechnology and mechanical engineering. Rusnano requires all companies that win funding to operate in Russia, the FT added.