Platform for take-off: SPIEF experts discuss national digital solutions

The second day of the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum-2019 was opened by the Forbes business breakfast called “National platforms: the path to self-isolation or growth areas?” Experts discussed Russian platform solutions, the features of their promotion and state participation in their development.

The digital revolution completely defines the agenda, both socio-economic and political, said the moderator, Forbes editorial director Nikolai Uskov, while opening the discussion: “By the scale of the changes we are experiencing now, we can only compare our time with the Renaissance – the time when the world, let’s say, turned upside down. Do we use the opportunities that the technological revolution offers us, is a big question. Only now we are beginning to understand how the founder of mathematics, geometry, and music, Pythagoras was right, when he said the famous “All is number”.

Nikolai Uskov outlined the main topic of the meeting – the creation of national platform solutions on which various services are based: “We are talking about national platforms: these are state platforms and platforms launched by private businesses. It’s not so important for what purposes – to ensure the sovereignty of the country or to solve the current problems of the economy.” The moderator of the discussion raised the question: can Russian national platforms be of interest to the world market or are we hopelessly behind foreign competitors?

According to the president of IPChain Association Andrey Krichevsky, only those Russian platforms that will not copy foreign ones will succeed in the world market: “When working in the field of intellectual property, in particular, with copyright, patents and trademarks, we see that many domestic services, platforms and digital ecosystems duplicate or replicate the existing western ones. Such solutions immediately acquire a number of limitations: their niche is a local market only. There’s no point in entering the global market in such a case. In my opinion, the uniqueness of the features of the services offered kind of “hacks” such pattern, as well as the creation of “tricky parts” or a narrow focus, specialization. For example, there is Ebay with consumer goods, and we have IPEX – a digital exchange for working with intellectual property.”

Andrey Belevtsev, Digital Transformation Director of PJSC Gazprom Neft, agrees with him: “When we talk about platforms, the first thing to do is decide on the concept itself. Many believe that making platforms is much more fashionable and exciting than some kind of dull project. The word “platform” is now used in season and out of season’. In fact, there are commercial platforms, their task is to find people on the market and bring them together, and there also exist technological platforms. Their main task is to facilitate the development of products, to ensure that the next product on this platform appears and reaches the consumer faster. In both cases, it is important to think about how to consolidate a certain demand, how to make sellers and buyers find each other easier and faster without intermediaries, and how to make the service as comfortable as possible for the client. There are uniquely closed platforms, and their owners are thus trying to attract maximum benefit. There are platforms that make everything as open as possible – on the principle of “let’s join forces.” In our case, the second way seems more interesting to me.”

Alexander Povalko, CEO of the Russian Venture Company (RVC), agreed that the success of a platform depends on the correct task and an interesting idea: “It is very important to create platforms for the distribution of urgent tasks and the maximum involvement of players interested in solving them. This will help to avoid direct costs associated with the accumulation of target resource, and transfer tasks directly to those who want and can deal with them. It all starts with an idea, and if everyone is interested in the idea, then the platform can become international, as happened with Facebook and Airbnb.”

In turn, Oleg Teplov, CEO at VEB Innovations, urged the participants in the discussion to clearly distinguish between the tasks of national and global platforms: “Platforms appear when there is a demand for certain services. The peculiarity of national platforms is that when the government invests budget funds, it does not think about monetization. Global platforms are completely different. They should be profitable; people should be interested in using them. Our goal is to make consumers understand what services they will receive and what it will give them.”

Sergey Matveev, the President of the Federation of Intellectual Property, expressed a different point of view. Returning to the question raised at the beginning of the meeting – “Can national platforms be interesting to the global market,” he said: “In the context of the experience that we observe with the “Mir” card and IPChain, we can say that there can be no national platforms, there can be only global platforms. The government, in its turn, needs to be very sensitive about regulation and understand its mission. The first stage is not to interfere, because every platform is a new technology, and new technology should not fall under regulatory barriers. The government, having passed a law, actually stops the platforms, and they will no longer be able to cover the national market. But the laws and regulations may be linked when the platform takes off. If the law is adopted in a timely and correct manner, then national consumers must be pulled into this platform, to grow its mass. And then the platform with these good practices will have a better chance of success.”

The Head of Practice at “FBK Pravo” Elena Shigidina supported the idea: “Any platform is an object of intellectual property. The laws and regulations relating to IT platforms is currently rather scattered. In terms of legislation, there is that point of growth that must be overcome. But law always follows the market needs. In my opinion, it is very important not to focus on the national idea of platforms so that there is access to international markets.”

According to the Managing Partner of Mindsmith.io Ruslan Yusufov, in order not to become outsiders, there is simply no other way but to develop technological solutions: “At the beginning of the meeting, an analogy was made with the Renaissance. Technology has no limits: the possibilities that the Internet has given us are endless. As history shows, countries that believed in new technologies have secured an economic breakthrough. If we now lag behind other countries, it will be impossible to catch up with them. The distributed registry technology is changing the rules of the game. And in the future there will be two parallel worlds: one – fast, transparent, efficient, with high margin, and the other will lose in a number of indicators. Russia now needs to choose in which world it wants to exist.”

Maxim Parshin, Deputy Minister of Digital Development, Telecommunications and Mass Media of the Russian Federation, spoke about the functioning of state platforms in the context of global applicability: “Ten years ago, we solved only application tasks, and no one thought that we were building platforms. At some point, we realized that we created the platforms on which there are currently 6 million authorizations per day, and 93 million users of the portal of public services. Now we understand that all our products are local in the sense that they are suitable for our country, but they are not needed on the global market, they were designed for internal use. For further development, we need to pay more attention to public and private partnerships and invite other independent market players to participate, for example, businesses or our colleagues from neighboring countries.”

Marina Amelina, Director of Government Relations at “Baring Vostok Capital Partners”, believes that development of the platforms requires healthy competition: “For example, when Yandex entered the Turkish market, it significantly raised the overall level of services in the country. On the contrary, if in isolation, large players begin to “dry up” the competition, which adversely affects the quality of most services. If there was a “scorched earth”, then nothing of what we are currently consuming would have appeared.”

Leonid Gokhberg, Director of the Institute for Statistical Studies and Economics of Knowledge, raised the problems of Russian platform solutions: “Digital platforms imply new business models and functional solutions. Russian platforms have some success in B2B and B2C, as well as in public services, but we do not see high-end platforms in the real sector of the economy and in the high-tech industries. This is due to the fact that the problems of digital transformation and business are a special case of problems related to the innovative activities of corporations. Here we have a full range of traditional problems of the Russian economy related to the innovative climate and the level of competition, multiplied by the specifics of digital platforms.”

German Klimenko, the founder and owner of the news aggregator MediaMetrics, pointed out the specifics of the national platforms development: “You can not rely fully on someone else technologies. In many industries, there is such a dichotomy: security and speed, and we need to find a balance between reliability, reputation, and the dynamics of digital transformation. From the point of view of technological development, you can’t make decisions for a long time. I’ve been in the banking sector for 25 years, and 19 of them we discussed the issue of the national payment system, and until our Western colleagues specifically “asked for it”, it did not appear. In our case, we must train our specialists; motivate them to develop their skills and to live in Russia. We need the “best of the best”, and not the “worst of the best.” The government must provide equal conditions for our platforms and foreign analogues, create a demand for domestic solutions.”

Russian national platforms operate under the dominance of foreign technologies. This was stated by Sergei Glazyev, the Advisor to the President of the Russian Federation on Regional Economic Integration: “Neither in the legislation nor in practice there are any restrictions on the import of technologies. The share of foreign technological base in equipment installation at present exceeds 50%. We need to minimize our dependence on foreign technologies, but the government does not take protectionist steps and, as far as I know, does not plan to do so. The need for expansion of our own technological base stems from the desire to ensure independent development of Russian technologies.”

Alina Akinshina, CEO at “Online Patent”, expressed her opinion on the key feature of the platforms: “The platform assumes openness, because it was originally designed to create services or stimulate active interaction of market participants on its basis.”