Ural Federal University Innovators Recap the Year’s Achievements and Results
UrFU innovators can be rightfully proud of their achievements in the outgoing year 2023: the program of creation and development of the university’s technology transfer center was implemented, which led to a two-fold increase in the number of intellectual property rights registered by the university compared to 2021, while the income from their commercialization increased by 25%. In addition, UrFU holds the first place in the Russian Federation in terms of the number of invention applications. This is reported in the latest issue of the newspaper of the Ural Federal University (No. 20 of December 4).
Another striking indicator, which appeared thanks to innovators: according to the results of the evaluation of universities’ performance in 2023, UrFU takes the honorable third place among the participants of the federal project “Platform of University Technological Entrepreneurship”.
The competition for schoolchildren to take part in the Ural Project Shifts at Sirius, which have already become a brand of the region and attract the most talented 8th-11th grade students from schools in the Sverdlovsk region, is steadily growing: in 2023, it will be six people per place. In addition, innovators from the Ural Federal University in partnership with the country’s leading companies have been successfully organizing the Advanced Production Technologies track of the Big Challenges scientific and technological project-based educational program on the same hospitable Sochi territory for many years.
Students are also in the focus of attention of innovators. Bright examples are the Startup as a Diploma contest, which attracted more than 650 participants, the Student Patent competition, the Student Patent Office, pre-acceleration and acceleration programs, in which more than 6,000 students took part.
It is worth noting that the innovation infrastructure of UrFU is, first of all, a well-established system of technological entrepreneurship development, which has something to offer to both children and adult startups and corporations. For example, the UrFU Startup Studio has started active financing of 15 youth innovative startups, and the UrFU acceleration is already more than a business program for the fast-track development of projects – its team builds effective “bridges of friendship” with the leading companies of the region, conducting targeted and demand-driven corporate programs.
And it has borne fruit: revenues from the activities of innovative centers and management of innovative activities, including within the framework of import substitution projects, have doubled.
Innovative activity of the university is expanding in other directions: the creation of the production infrastructure of the engineering development center, designed to create prototypes of equipment, is being completed. The mechanism of obtaining registration certificates of the Ministry of Health of the Russian Federation for radiopharmaceuticals planned for release has been worked out. Registration certificates have been obtained for drugs based on fluorine isotope; work on registration of radiopharmaceuticals based on radium and lutetium isotopes is approaching its final stage; the plan for the development of the second stage of the cyclotron center has been determined.