Robots in Russia: The Long, Strange Journey from Lab to Marketplace
Key disconnect: Losing and then trying to regain entrepreneurial momentum in Russia
“Russia is famous for scientific talent, but not for entrepreneurial thinking that can turn bright ideas into profitable businesses.” —Isabel Gorst, Financial Times
Why did Isabel Gorst write that? Maybe this is part of the why:
In 1993, I visited a factory near Moscow where every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday the engineers and technicians made the nose cones for the sophisticated MiG-29 fighter jet, while every Thursday and Friday, the same factory made toasters.
No one in the entire factory had any idea—or even cared—how much it cost to build a nose cone or a toaster. Cost accounting in Russia in 1993 was glaringly absent from most anything, while management saw no reason why brilliant engineers and technicians shouldn’t be making toasters two days a week.
Materials to fabricate the nose cones and toasters arrived from parts unknown. The nose cones and toasters were then manufactured and where shipped off to parts unknown. The comings and goings of raw materials and finished products were a total mystery. At least, that’s how everyone at the factory saw the process: They had grown up, they said, in a country where there was no reason to think any differently.
So they didn’t. They went home nightly to their families, got paid weekly, and in-between lived as best as they could. No one was taught to aspire to anything other than their job…except maybe to become a member of the Communist Party. The only reason they saw Party membership as beneficial was to avoid waiting in long lines for such things as poorly-made Russian TVs. Party membership had its privileges.
The tool shop within the factory, which seemed to be where all the design work took place, looked like something out of a U.S. circa-WWII factory. All the tools, lathes, and drill presses were very well-kept and maintained, but were decades out of date. No one knew any better…except the IT guys.
The IT guys knew better, but had zero access to the better. They had ugly-looking, boxy computers that had no hard drives, no floppy drives, no input other than cassette tape (which they jury-rigged on their own from a smuggled cassette recorder); and no software of any kind, except programs that they developed on their own. When they programmed, which was constantly, they did so in machine language. Agonizingly tedious and slow, they plunked away with binary or hexadecimal instructions for their balky machines.
Primitive as they seemed at first encounter, these engineers and technicians had developed some remarkable skills working as closely as each did with their materials and technology. Some could touch a finished nose cone with their fingertips and tell more about the quality of the job than any instrument. They were in direct, intimate contact with the entire fabrication process, and they spoke about it as if it was an extension of themselves.
Same with the IT guys. They didn’t have a translation medium with which to code; they spoke directly to the heart and soul of their computers, and understood the machine’s every nuance.
One technician, using pieces of asbestos and other heat resistant materials had sewn together a glove he used to manipulate hot metal in test ovens. He had made one for each of his job mates.
I told him that the glove idea was worth a million dollars on U.S. television; every backyard grill master or home fireplace log turner would buy one. What a fantastic business he had in that glove.
He didn’t get it at all, likewise his mates didn’t get it when I asked them. Developing the glove, no problem for any of them. However, becoming entrepreneurial and making a business from it was totally alien.
That was the disconnect in Russia of 1993: No business sense to match a unique product idea. The inventor would have gladly accepted a small bag of near-worthless ruble notes for his million-dollar idea, but saw no way of a making a business from it.
Fifteen-hundred miles to the south in Astrakhan, I visited another factory, and got the exact same reaction as I had from my Moscow buddies. Then again, on the midnight train from Moscow to St. Petersburg, a craftsman offered to sell me a chessboard with magnificently tooled ivory chess pieces (that had taken him two years to carve). He had no idea as to the value of his labor and artistry. Once in St. Petersburg at yet another factory, I was again visited by the identical business and entrepreneurial oblivion.
Incredibly, it seemed endemic to the entire country. Somewhere between Lenin and “glasnost” it had gone missing. It was beyond sad; it was tragic.
Walking away from the factory in Moscow, I turned and looked back. My thought at that moment was, given a few good tech tools and a bit of an investment, these guys will kick ass, someday.
Now however, whenever I see an ad for the “Ove Glove” on late-night TV, I also think of those guys making nose cones and toasters…with not even a vague idea about how businesses operate.
What will happen, I thought, if and when the Russians are someday able to yoke together the technical with the entrepreneurial? Wow!
More than two decades later, I’m now watching the rise of Russian robotics…and thinking about what has changed in the entrepreneurial dynamic since nose cones and toasters.
My fear is that not enough has taken place. In robotics, there’s some evidence of entrepreneurism and business acumen bubbling up here and there. It’s refreshing to see.
This is a critical juncture at which Albert Yefimov, the new director of the Skolkovo Foundation’s Robocentre (new since 2014), needs to nurture both robotics and entrepreneurism if a robotics ecosystem and allied industries are to take root and flourish.
Yefimov says he’ll head “a government working group that will produce a plan for the development of Russian robotics.” According Yefimov, there are more than 200 companies in Russia that specialize in robotics and related technologies.
Lots of skilled roboticists, great machines, and global businesses await his attention. Make no mistake, it’s a huge job he’s taking on.