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Innovation in the USSR. The story about the Novosibirsk Academgorodok, which could become the "Soviet Silicon Valley"

In 1958, a large-scale project was launched - the creation of the Academgorodok near Novosibirsk. Mikhail Lavrentiev and his associates created a scientific city in Siberia, in which education, science and technology would harmoniously develop.

In the 60s, Academgorodok was actively developing, developing more and more advanced approaches to what is customarily called innovative activity, even ahead of its Western counterparts, such as Stanford or MIT.

Today we will tell you what the success of the Academgorodok was and why it was not possible to repeat the transatlantic success story in the open spaces of Siberia.

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In any modern device, components and technologies of dozens of manufacturers, development of dozens of laboratories and know-how of hundreds of engineers. Modern high-tech products are not created by individuals or companies, but by whole innovation ecosystems, such as Silicon Valley, California, USA.

In regional ecosystems in a single territory, a critical mass of people, ideas, technologies and financial resources arise. In these territories, social and economic development is taking place at an accelerated pace, and the ground is created for innovations in technology and management.

In conversations concerning innovation, they often mention the successful experience of the USSR. They recall the Soviet space, the peaceful atom, the network of academic and industry research institutes. The question arises: were there any attempts to build innovation ecosystems in the USSR? The answer is yes. Something like Silicon Valley could have arisen in the Soviet Union.

This article is the first of a series of articles on the history and philosophy of innovation, primarily in the field of IT. A special place in the series will be occupied by the topic of innovation ecosystems - places where new technologies, products and companies are born and reach maturity with systematic constancy.

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Summary:

Novosibirsk Akademgorodok was founded in 1957. The founders of Akademgorodok created a center in which they would jointly develop: science, industry and education.
Scientific research should have been the basis for innovation. In the 1960s, in Academgorodok, the evolutionary path of successive ideas about what innovation is and how to implement it, quickly passed.

  1. It all started with applied research on specific technological issues.
  2. Further, attention has shifted to developing its own technologies in several key areas. Particularly important was the process of training engineers from enterprises to new technologies.
  3. At the next stage, in Akademgorodok, they began to work more closely with interested enterprises and to develop adapted technological solutions for a specific order.
  4. Further, replicable high-tech products began to be developed.
  5. It all ended in the early 70s at the stage of creating new experimental production organizations.

In the 70s, the development of the innovation ecosystem of Akademgorodok slowed down, it seems, in view of organizational stiffness and bureaucracy, especially that increased in the Brezhnev period.

An ecosystem built around Stanford University in Palo Alto, the future heart of Silicon Valley, did a similar way in the 60s, but, unlike Academgorodok, its growth was not restrained by administrative barriers.

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Details about the development of the attitude of science and industry in Academgorodok, approaches to innovations can be found “first-hand”. The fact is that the founder of the Academgorodok, Mikhail Lavrentiev, shortly before his own death in 1980, published a book “... Growth will be Siberia,” in which he described the story of his own creation, Academgorodok and the Siberian Branch of the Academy of Sciences. In one of the chapters of the book, Lavrentyev describes in detail not only the organizational forms of the relationship between science and industry, but also gradually examines the path of their development (quotes from this book below).

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Mikhail Alekseevich Lavrentiev

Founding of Academgorodok


In the 1950s, academicians Lavrentiev, Sobolev, and Khristanovich developed the idea of ​​creating a scientific city in Siberia far from political, ideological, and economic pressure.

Lavrentiev, Sobolev and Khristanovich, who gained prestige thanks to the work in military projects, primarily nuclear, suggested creating a scientific city near Novosibirsk, making it the center of the new Siberian Branch of the USSR Academy of Sciences.

The project was supported by Khrushchev, who was closely acquainted with Lavrentiev from the time he worked in Ukraine, where Khrushchev occupied the leading positions of the Communist Party in the early postwar years, and Lavrentyev served as vice president of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR. The project to create a new city in 1957 was approved by the government.

Lavrentiev and his associates were also able to convince other scientists, both young and successful, that the project was promising, and also to persuade many of them to move from the European part of the country to Siberia.

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Entrance to Akademgorodok. Picture taken at an early stage of construction.

Construction went at an accelerated pace. By 1961, a university and 14 different research institutes were built in Akademgorodok, covering the entire spectrum of the natural sciences, as well as mathematics and medicine.

Unlike the USA, in the USSR most scientific laboratories were located not in universities, but in scientific research institutes. The university played a mainly educational role. In Akademgorodok, the so-called “Physics and Technology System” was implemented, connecting education and scientific work. According to her, undergraduate and graduate students should join research groups in research institutes. Scientific research institutes carried out both applied and fundamental research.

In the 60s Academgorodok was formed as a special ecosystem, connecting science, education and production according to the original plan. "Science - personnel - production" - this is how the famous "Lavrentiev Triangle" was briefly formulated.

Mikhail Lavrentiev considered the connection with industry to be an important part of the project of the Academgorodok. However, building an effective link between science and industry in the 60s of the twentieth century was a completely new challenge, both in the USSR and in the USA.

Academgorodok and Industry in the 60s


In the period of the late 50s - early 60s, the search for forms of effective communication of applied problems and scientific research started.

The process of finding forms of effective interaction can be divided into several stages.
In his book, Lavrentiev describes the work performed at the Research Institute of Hydrodynamics, the main specialization of which was the theory of explosions. There are several stages in the development of relations between science and industry in the 1960s.

1. Initially, at the first stage, scientists of the Academgorodok began to build ties with the industry of Siberia:
“The close relationship with the national economy was from the first days of the organization of the Siberian Branch one of its fundamental principles. When the buildings of the institutes were still being erected, the teams of scientists of the Siberian Branch of the Academy of Sciences had already traveled to Siberian enterprises and construction sites in Norilsk, Yakutia, the Krasnoyarsk Hydroelectric Power Plant, the plants of Omsk and Kemerovo, the mines and mines of Kuzbass. They gave lectures, gave consultations, established connections, many of which turned into perennial ones, turned into strong cooperation. ”
2. The Research Institute of Hydrodynamics paid great attention to their own scientific research, but soon, at the second stage, based on the requests of enterprises, several major practical problems were highlighted, on which the institute began to work.

One of these problems was the high cost and unreliability of the products of metallurgy. It was solved through the use of explosions in various technical processes: reducing crystal lattice defects, welding, applying thin metal coatings.
“During an explosion, there is such a pressure that the strength properties of metals become insignificant, in a narrow zone adjacent to the contact surface, metals behave like liquids. <...> The discovery was so successful that new technologies poured from the cornucopia. ”
At the junction of metallurgy, hydrodynamics, chemistry, mathematical modeling, a new direction in the development of metallurgical technologies was born.
“The opportunity has opened up to create new multi-layered materials with the help of an explosion, combining mechanical strength with chemical resistance, anti-corrosion resistance and other valuable qualities.”
In 1964, the first trial batches of new materials of bimetals, created by a new technology, were released.

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Getting bimetal explosion. The explosion (1) tightly presses two different metals (2) each other
However, in the promotion of new technology in production there were certain difficulties: the new idea was incomprehensible to the engineers at the factories and was met with "hostility". The introduction of new technology into production (on the scale of large plants, and not individual workshops) took up to 15 years. The solution to the problem of introducing new technologies was in the hands of people, training new cadres who understood the new technology. For this, specialists in new welding technologies began to be trained in Novosibirsk centrally, which allowed launching new production facilities in less than 3 years already in the 80s.

3. At the third stage, the work began to be conducted not with respect to new technological directions, but with respect to individual products and industries potentially interested in them.

In the mid-60s, work began to be carried out with customers directly interested in new technologies .
“Our powerful and reliable partner has become a powerful enterprise - the Novosibirsk Chkalov Aviation Plant. One of the tendencies of modern engineering is to increase the strength of materials: the designs of them can be of smaller section and weight, and the consumption of metal is reduced. But to manufacture parts from such highly durable materials becomes more and more difficult. One of the effective ways is stamping with impulse (fast) loaded, including with the help of an explosion. ”
4. At the fourth stage, the Hydrodynamics Research Institute developed the first high-tech product - a safe detonator.
“The use of an explosion in industry has always been limited by the potential danger of the method. <...> At the Institute of Hydrodynamics, the structure of the mechanism of detonation in various explosive environments was deciphered <...>. Studying detonation processes, one of my students, L.A. Lukyanchikov, discovered that using some properties of this phenomenon, one can create a detonator that is completely safe under normal conditions. Such a detonator can be thrown, hammered, even connected to it a current from the industrial network - it will not explode <...>. To undermine it, you need a high voltage current from a special generator. Thus, it became possible to quietly conduct blasting operations in the factory. ”
A replicable release of the detonator began at the Chkalov partner plant for use in many areas of the economy. The universal insensitive detonator turned out to be a product for solving a variety of technical problems, such as welding, surface cleaning, diamond synthesis, and so on, and in different industries and completely different situations requiring the use of an explosion.

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Leonid Aleksandrovich Lukyanchikov and detonator circuit

Chkalov’s interest in the plant, its proximity, the enthusiasm of the plant’s specialists, the personal initiative and openness of L. A. Luk'yanchikov and other scientists of the Hydrodynamics Institute made it possible to create a product directly on the basis of the customer’s enterprise. Spontaneously, the assembled team of enthusiasts solved the problem of organizing activities in creating a product.

However, cases where both the potential customer, and the customer’s enterprise specialists, and scientists are actively going to each other to meet for the development of a new product for various reasons are relatively rare. Often, a long time is needed for the development of technology, its approbation, as well as specific resources, such as equipment, which the customer does not have.
The solution of this problem was the second factor that led to the creation of the “introduction belt” of the Academgorodok.

5. By the end of the 60s, at the fifth stage, the expediency of including production directly into the Academgorodok system was realized by Lavrentiev and his colleagues. The system of design bureaus of “double subordination” was proposed, which were to constitute the “innovation belt” of the Academgorodok. The idea was as follows.
“At the academic institutions themselves, design bureaus are created and operate and, under the direct supervision of the authors of inventions and discoveries, their“ offspring ”are researched, tested and transferred to the industry in the form of ready-made samples with a proven technology of their manufacture suitable for mass production. <...> The scheme was as follows: the institute gives a scientific idea, the ministry builds a KB near the Academgorodok, gives its people, we - our own, authors of the idea and the youth graduating from the university. All of them together "bring the product." In these design bureaus and experimental productions, the scientific idea will ripen, overgrow with flesh, turn first into drawings, models, models, then into prototypes that can already be transferred for further implementation. ”
However, there were problems with the implementation of the idea.

First, the ministries did not always recognize the independence of the KB, began to use to perform their current tasks, and not to conduct new developments.

Secondly, it was also not possible to create generally accepted provisions regulating the creation and operation of new design bureaus - the bureaucratic costs for settling them were too high, which took about 10 years.

These problems strongly hampered the development of the “double subordination” design bureau and negated the motivation of scientists to create new design bureaus for their projects. As a result, an undertaking that could develop into the creation of a large scientific and industrial cluster led only to the creation of a small number of design bureaus.

There were initiatives to create new research and production teams bypassing the ministries. And if in the era of thaw power was neutral to such experiments, then in the Brezhnev era, the bureaucratic machine ceased to tolerate experiments and demanded clarity in terms of accountability and subordination of this or that organization.

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M.A. Lavrentiev and B.V. Wojciechowski in the production workshop of the hydro-pulse technology design bureau, the first enterprise of the “introduction belt”.

In the 70s and 80s, Akademgorodok focused on simpler forms of cooperation with industry and sectoral ministries, for example, “around the end of the ninth five-year plan in the Siberian Branch, with the active participation of Academician G.I. the principle of "entering the industry." It consists in the fact that the introduction of scientific developments is most expedient to be carried out at large, leading enterprises that master the innovation, and then, with the support of the ministry, extend it to their entire industry. ” This made innovation very dependent on ministries and bureaucracy, reduced organizational flexibility that is important for the creation and implementation of new technologies, thereby reducing the potential for innovation.

Even in the early 1980s, the “introduction belt” of the Academgorodok, which could become the basis of a new ecosystem, was still a bold experiment, and not a sustainable formation. The “introduction belt” of the Novosibirsk Academgorodok is, of course, not the only one and today is not the most important way to transfer the results of science to production. ”

By the 1980s, Lavrentiev was still optimistic about the prospects of the Academgorodok as an innovation center.
“A large-scale experiment is under way at Novosibirsk, the purpose of which is to develop a large center of basic research into an even larger scientific and technical complex with a substantially new system of internal and external relations. The successful development of these links deep and wide should increase the efficiency of scientific work in such a way that it will gradually change the traditional approaches to assessing the development, planning and financing of scientific and technological research. Fundamental research, while remaining the main content of such complexes, can receive additional impulses due to the feedback system: a quick test of theory and experiment, the direct exchange of ideas, personnel and resources with industry. ”
However, on the other side of the ocean by this point, during the period of the 60s - 80s, similar ideas have already been realized in an ecosystem known as Silicon Valley.

Results


For about a decade, starting in 1961, Akademgorodok has gone from understanding innovation as

1) research, having an applied nature, to
2) the development of new technologies, to
3) the development of "custom" solutions for specific customers, to
4) the creation of replicable high-tech products, 5) the creation of new experimental production organizations ("start-ups", if expressed in modern language).

A similar path was made at the same time across the ocean. However, in the 1970s, Silicon Valley significantly outstripped other ecosystems in development. In the USA, due to the relative ease of organizing firms, the possibilities for creating new teams and entire productions were much greater. And if in the 60s the total number of firms operating in Palo Alto - the heart of the future Silicon Valley - did not exceed 100 units, then in the 70s their number will increase several times, and with the development of venture capitalism in the 80s orders. In addition, not only the ease of creating organizations is important, but also their internal flexibility. Thanks to such flexibility of the 70s - 80s, micro-revolution in internal organization of companies, marketing, sales, management, which are important for high-tech business to this day, occur in such companies as Fairchild Semiconductors and Intel.

To create new technologies and products, it is necessary to create new teams that unite representatives from different disciplines and different areas of activity. In the USSR, for example, several creative teams, with the help of patronage of the authorities, managed to find an organizational-administrative form that satisfies the requirements of the bureaucracy, then an institutional mechanism is needed to form dozens and hundreds of organizations.

It can be assumed that if bureaucratic inflexibility, even if on a single territory, was overcome, then Academgorodok could, by analogy with Silicon Valley of the 70th model, count many dozens of jointly working innovative enterprises. However, even in this case, the Silicon Valley in the modern sense, Academgorodok certainly would not - for the further exponential growth of the ecosystem, new ways of attracting investments would be needed, which could not arise in a planned economy.

The evolution of Silicon Valley - from a small technopark working under military orders to a global IT development center occupying dozens of square kilometers is the topic of the next article.

Literature


Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/411481/

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