Guiding Principles and Goals
The mission of Skoltech will be to educate students, advance knowledge, and foster innovation in order to address critical scientific, technological, and innovation challenges and gaps facing Russia and the world. Skoltech will be a new university model for Russia built on a number of guiding principles, and contributing to several goals:
- Create a university environment of innovation: Skoltech will bring together research and education across a broad spectrum of science, engineering, and innovation areas in order to foster multidisciplinary discoveries and inventions that arise through the mixing of students, faculty and researchers across traditional disciplinary boundaries.
- Integrate education and research: in addition to course work, graduate students will participate in research throughout their education; each Skoltech faculty member will both teach and engage in research, in order to foster excellence and creativity in both.
- Develop and embed university components of an innovation and entrepreneurship ecosystem within Skolkovo. These university components include formal and informal education in innovation and entrepreneurship, as well as university policies and structures for interfacing with industrial commercialization and venture opportunities as they develop at Skolkovo and elsewhere.
- Lay the foundation for a world-class research university that will help attract, create, and retain both Russian and international talent to Skolkovo and Russia.
Many of these principles, goals and approaches are familiar to and consistent with the recent evolution of Western universities and economies. These goals are based on recognition of the increasingly important role that research universities play as part of a vibrant innovation ecosystem. Skoltech will be built on the best traditions of Russian education and research structures and practices but with a new focus on entrepreneurship and innovation. Skoltech will strive for a modelthat seeks to integrate education and research. Skoltech will integrate and span fundamental scientific and engineering research across disciplinary boundaries; and that interfaces with a broader industrial and entrepreneurial ecosystem to foster high impact research and generate innovative flows to the economy.