Quantum technologies: approving roadmaps
Ruslan Yunusov, head of the quantum project office
The most positive event for everything RussianThe quantum community is the approval and coordination by the government of roadmaps for quantum technologies. Any other action or even scientific discovery pales in comparison to this, since we are talking about the starting point for the development of an entire industry.
If we consider exclusively the areaquantum computing, then 2020 laid the foundation for the creation of a domestic quantum computer. In fact, this is the first milestone with approved targets for the main areas: superconductors, ions, atoms, photons and the cloud platform. The pandemic did not disrupt the announced timing - work is in full swing. Leaders of research groups have been selected, the groups themselves are formed, equipment is purchased for additional equipment of existing laboratories and the construction of new ones.
Retail: digitalization everywhere
Ilya Krivorot, CEO of Sinteza:
I would not say that everything that happened in 2020events are only negative. Pandemic, exchange rate volatility and budget deficit are serious problems only in the short term. I do not like the phrase "crisis is a time of opportunity" because of its banality, but the lack of money and, as a result, increased attention to them, as well as the complete inability to work in the old fashioned way, forces companies to create very correct processes within themselves in the long term.
Any digitalization format is no longeroptional attribute. Yes, in Moscow, St. Petersburg and other cities with high Internet penetration, the level of online opportunities was already quite high, but now it is a global benchmark. Even classic banks, in which the lion's share of the procedures was associated with a physical presence in the branch, learned how to conduct many processes online. For example, to obtain a loan, a company representative no longer needs to come to a bank office several times, communicate, fill out a lot of documents on the spot - all this is solved by a combination of Zoom and electronic document management.
Foodtech: consolidating players
Andrey Zyuzin, General Director of EFKO Innovations:
In our industry, the most significant andWe consider the consolidation taking place in the field of food delivery to be a positive development. The prerequisites for this trend are COVID-19 and the refusal of people to go to restaurants, but at the same time the need to preserve the nutritional value, convenience and safety of food consumption.
How did this affect the foodtech market in Russia? For example, a joint venture between Sberbank and Mail.ru Group gained control over the Samokat food delivery service. Later, Kitchen in the District also entered the ecosystem of Sberbank and Mail.ru Group. All these deals help food delivery services to enter those regions of our country where they were not previously represented.
I would like to note that Russia does not lag behind hereworld trends. In the top of the largest deals in the FoodTech sector for 2020, we most often see delivery services. For example, the Indonesian company Gojek raised $ 1.2 billion in March this year, and in July the operator of the online food delivery platform Miss Fresh raised $ 495 million.
Medtech: growing demand for telemedicine
Denis Shvetsov, General Director of the digital medical service Doctor Nearby:
For the digital health industry, a pandemicbecame a very powerful impetus for development. Firstly, due to the lockdown in Russia, the demand for remote medical consultations has grown many times over. If before the COVID-19 epidemic, telemedicine was perceived as something exotic, now it is common for many Russians to call a doctor online. Secondly, people have become more interested in their health, invest in various programs to maintain this resource, and look for new opportunities for disease prevention. They also began to pay more attention to the service component: the ability to talk to a doctor at any time, anywhere, receive examination results and collect all data in the application is a reality today.
At the same time, government authoritiesFederal and regional levels began to pay special attention to the digitalization of healthcare: telemedicine centers, electronic cards, prescriptions are gradually but inevitably coming into our lives. Key players are actively developing in the field of artificial intelligence, chatbots for patient routing, and checking the correctness of medical decisions. More and more regions are introducing telemedicine into the compulsory medical insurance system.
Autotech: trend for here and now
Ilya Klyuev, Head of Development Department at BaseTracK:
The undoubted trend of this year is the transitionon waste-free production and clean energy (a vivid example is electric transport), and this topic, of course, requires many clarifications and has a huge number of nuances - even depending on the geography of use.
In connection with this “uncertainty” I would liketo give an example of a more illustrative sphere, therefore, we still consider the most significant (albeit not positive) event for this year to be the recognition of a person’s guilt for an accident in which an unmanned vehicle was involved. The driver, who was supposed to monitor the actions of the drone, was found guilty of a fatal accident for a pedestrian. This event shows that the approach to the transport of the future needs to change. In the minds of one part of people there lives a concept inspired by science fiction, in which all transport is about to suddenly become independent, and in the minds of another part of people independent transport “from the evil one” is not needed at all.
The real situation is somewhere in between, and inIn real life, we once again saw that even a person is not ideal: you can still make him much safer (for yourself and others) and more efficiently. This was reflected in the market - more companies are starting to focus on technologies that are useful now, and not in 10-15 years. So the best that AutoTech has to offer right now is driver assistance systems.
EdTech: translation of events online
Alexander Alpern, CEO of Webinar Group:
One of the most significant events for participantsMany innovative industries became the international Startup Village conference in May, which this year was held entirely online for the first time. The conference received more than 185 thousand views on the event website alone, and thanks to integration with third-party resources, another 1.2 million. Lectures and practical tracks of Startup Village Livestream were attended by participants from more than 100 countries, including China, the USA, Germany, France, Great Britain, India, Japan.
The themes of the tracks covered many areas:how to attract investment, what technologies to invest in, how to interact with the government. For some projects, the startup competition within the conference became an accelerator and an additional source of funding.
Prerequisites for more flexible formatsin the event industry has been long overdue, but the epidemiological situation helped to correctly prioritize. Among them are comfort, safety and time savings for participants and speakers, optimization of costs for organizers and, in general, increasing the availability of knowledge and unique insights for those who develop an innovative economy. This experience can and should be replicated.
E-commerce: increasing working capital and stimulating exports
Natalia Subbotina, CEO and co-founder of the technologically advanced e-commerce service "Cactus":
The main positive event is, of course,the unprecedented leap that occurred in the online trading market in 2020. It is clear that the reason for this was the pandemic - under other circumstances, development would have occurred gradually, over 3-4 years. The arrival of a new target audience and a sharp increase in the number of transactions had a beneficial effect on the entire online market and led to a number of positive changes.
For self-employed and individual entrepreneursThere are additional opportunities to start your own business in an area that requires small start-up investments. The number of prepaid orders has increased, which means the business has more working capital for development. Marketplaces, in turn, were able to quickly adapt to new volumes of orders, providing businesses with a simple and clear way to reach a wide audience without significant investments in product promotion. The state began to stimulate exports by simplifying the procedure for applying the zero VAT rate. It is now possible to enter foreign markets without actually placing the company in the jurisdiction of another country while maintaining high margins.
Finally, the trend towards the B2C (Business) model has intensifiedto Consumer), in which manufacturers go directly to customers, bypassing intermediaries. By reducing the number of links in the sales chain, it is easier for manufacturers to guarantee quality and provide goods to the end customer at a lower price.
AI: Growing Demand for Big Data Analysis
Tatiana Kozub, managing partner of the AI platform for business gagarin.ai:
The most significant positive of this year for ourspheres is that digital transformation has finally turned from a curiosity into an absolute norm. The need to rebuild business processes in accordance with new realities has become obvious to almost everyone - 2020 has shown that this is important not only for large companies (which had previously paid great attention to digitalization), but also for medium and small businesses. If before this digital transformation often ended with the purchase of new software or equipment upgrade, today companies are increasingly approaching this process in a more comprehensive manner.
Remote work has become a forced norm, significantPart of the interaction between businesses and customers has moved online and has become impossible without the use of digital tools. Businesses have begun to pay more attention to training employees in new technologies and IT solutions and are looking for ways to do this in a short time, at minimal cost, and preferably without interruption from work. The collection and analysis of large volumes of data has begun to play a key role - in order not to lose in the fight against competitors, it is increasingly important to make management decisions based on analytics, including in the process of digital transformation. This allows you to correctly assess which processes in the company can be automated, and where restructuring, additional employee training or the search for new personnel is necessary.
HR-tech: transformation of all approaches
Anton Kushner, founder of the corporate well-being platform "I understand":
The most important event this year isthe transformation that followed the pandemic. Even if we talk about the direction of HR without being tied to technology, all that happened forced to reformat the work of many people: in particular, office workers. The transition to a remote format, the introduction of appropriate IT tools, the development of new skills, a revision of the current system of benefits and compensation, employee motivation, communication with the employer - this has played a huge role for the industry.
In fact, talk about consolidating the newformat - teleworking - in the labor code began even before the pandemic. In addition to freelancers, self-employed people appeared, and people, in principle, began to think that the KPIs of many specialists are not tied to permanent presence in the office. Although this is still not reflected at the legislative level, I believe that the issue has been practically resolved. Business representatives themselves finally realized that costs can be greatly optimized by giving up part of the office space and leaving a number of specialists at a remote location. Companies would have come to this without a pandemic - another thing is that it would have happened much later. The coronavirus was the trigger.
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