HSE Business Incubator Named the Best University Business Accelerator in the World

The HSE Business Incubator took 1st place in the 2019-2020 UBI Global World Ranking of University-Linked Business Accelerators. An awards ceremony for the top ranked institutions was held at the World Incubation Summit in Doha, Qatar on November 6.

“Our victory is the result of more than 4 years of hard work and hundreds of experiments conducted by our team,”said Mikhail Erman, Head of the HSE Business Incubator. “In 2015, we started introducing new startup development techniques. This has led to an improvement in our standing on the UBI Global Rankings as well as other achievements: during this time, our graduates have attracted more than a billion roubles in investments and created more than a thousand jobs. This award today means a lot to us; it tells us that we are headed in the right direction and that we have found our niche in the venture capital market.”

The ranking rates the effectiveness of each university incubator in terms of 40 factors, which are grouped into three main categories: the impact on the ecosystem; the value for client startups; and the attractiveness of the incubation programme. In all three of these categories, the HSE Business Incubator performed higher than the average for all participating institutions. The HSE Business Incubator performed best in such areas as talent retention, graduate performance and economic impact, and, particularly, the number of jobs created in alumni startups.

This is the third year in a row that the HSE Business Incubator has placed in the top echelon of the ranking. In 2018, it took 7th place, and in 2017, it came in 14th.

The UBI Global ranking is the only ranking that assesses the performance of university-linked business incubators all over the world and provides a picture of global infrastructure trends. This year, 364 programmes from 78 countries were included in the ranking.

The HSE Business Incubator is a structural unit of HSE University and the first university-linked business incubator in Russia. Since 2006, the unit has been engaged in the generation and development of startups and contributed to the development of innovative infrastructure for the Russian government. Over the past 3 years alone, more than 800 teams have completed business incubator programmes, and graduates have attracted more than a billion rubles in investments.

The incubator has helped launch startups related to educational technology, marketing and advertising, retail, industrial robotics, unmanned aerial vehicles, financial technologies, information security, e-commerce, voice recognition and synthesis, augmented and virtual reality, and other industries. Prominent startups that have resulted from the HSE Business Incubator include TimePad, an event planning service; Kodabra, a programming school; GoLama, a grocery delivery service; Simple Good (‘Prostoe Dobro’), a charity water service; Store&Cash, a warehouse and trade accounting service; and others.