The VIII International Summer School "Doing Business in Russia" is over

18:22, July 18, 2021

It was attended by 30 students from 8 countries

30 participants from 8 countries studied innovative solutions for creative industries dictated by the challenges of the new time for 10 days in a hybrid format. And although the whole world is soon waiting for the largest sports event, the 2021 Olympics in Tokyo, the entire team of the VIII Summer School on July 16, 2021 had a feeling of closing the big event and ending the fairy tale!

The participants of the programme of this Summer School was lucky because during the entire academic year, the team of the International Management programme had projects with companies of the creative industries of the Ural region. And within the framework of the April conference “Spring Research Days”, we made friends with the tourist cluster "Gora Belaya", which acted as the general partner of the School. But it was also important that our old friends, invited lecturers from two partner Business schools (Skoda Auto University, Czech Republic, and IMM Ranchi Business School, India), our long-term partner of the KPMG programme, continued to cooperate with us, Senior Banker of the EBRD, a graduate of the Faculty of Economics of Ural State University (now UrFU) Tatyana Embulaeva, our good friend, co-founder of the Ural Music Night festival Lyubov Bondarenko, an established team of tutors Yuri Davy, Maxim Fokeev, Nikita Shvaleva, Stanislav Berezin.

Last year's positive experience of the School's projects last year in the field of creative industries (musical events) showed that the interest of the student audience in this relatively new area in the field of business is genuine and very lively, although the topic of the crisis caused by the coronavirus pandemic still sounds relevant. The organizers of the Summer School 2021, the team of the master's program "International Management", decided not only to present the opportunity to make group projects, but also to expand the idea of creative clusters and tourism in the Urals.

4 teams of students worked on projects on the locations of the tourist cluster "Gora Belaya". The result was projects in the form of a business plan for the development of either individual locations or the entire territory of the cluster, and one of the teams presented a project for including places located outside the cluster in tourist routes. The projects were presented to the jury, which, in addition to the team of the International Management programme and team tutors, included representatives of the cluster Marina Lenkova and Marina Akhtyamova. It was they who set the main criteria for accessing projects – the possibility of practical implementation, consistency with existing strategies, attractiveness for the consumer. In each project, the jury noted its strengths. Already during the defense, some of the proposals were sent to the public chat of the cluster to discuss ideas.

It is still difficult to talk about the next season of the Summer School, but I think we will continue to develop the topic of creative industries, especially since the Sverdlovsk Region is gradually becoming an important domestic center in this area. It is no coincidence that Yekaterinburg is preparing an application for inclusion in the UNESCO Network of Creative Cities project in the Music category.

Thank you to everyone who made this Summer School a reality, goodbye, Summer School “Doing Business in Russia”-2021 and hello, Summer School “Doing Business in Russia”-2022!