VC Seeks Innovation Back in the USSR

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Posted by Donald A. DePalma on July 19, 2005 in the following blogs: Translation and Localization, Web Globalization, Business Globalization, Technology, Interpreting, Market Data, Global Marketing, Best Practices, Supplier Business Issues
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When the Berlin Wall came down, some U.S. and Western European companies rushed the gate to gain access to the brain trust of Soviet and COMECON science, industry, and academe. For example, Sun Microsystems set up a lab in Moscow to study parallel processing technologies, yielding major advances in its SPARC computing architecture for mere kopecks on the ruble. Other companies took advantage of the extraordinarily high caliber of mathematicians, physicists, and cybernauts that had been festering in the planned economy of the U.S.S.R.

The emergence several years ago of the BRIC Coalition (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) woke many to the intellectual property treasures to be discovered in emerging economies. India and China lead the news, but other countries -- Russia still among them -- offer value to western entrepreneurs. The GEN3 group wants to uncover some of that untapped IP and bring it to market in the hot areas of wireless, energy, and medical devices. A big part of bringing these products to market will be localizing these largely software-driven product categories -- that means work on internationalization, localization, and translation. And it increases the opportunities for localized localization-enabling tools such as PASSOLO.

We've noted before the growth of major software and product development teams around the globe. GEN3 has picked Russia as its IP mine, looking for devices, products, and applications to make money. Other ambitious developers should think about these countires as sources of new applications

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