Moscow Meets Man

A former British paratrooper recruits top Russian scientists, installs them on the remote Isle of Man for a year, then sends them out to run cutting-edge technology companies in the West. Not so long ago, this might have come from a John Le Carré novel. But in today’s globalized, post-cold war world, a Russian tech incubator on a tax haven off Britain merely makes good business sense.

Ex-soldier Ian Woodcock, 40, brings scientists and their inventions out of politically unstable Russia and, with Western commercial expertise and outside investment, converts the ideas into companies ready for the global marketplace. “It’s the Russian upside without the Russian risk,” says Woodcock, who hugely admires the scientists who, through long isolation, “come at ideas from a different angle.”

So far, his two-year-old Flintstone Technologies has spun off four start-ups in partnership with 10 Russian scientists. The dotcom crash has helped: now investors seem interested in technologies that can help boring Old Economy industries. The four companies are based in Oxford and Cambridge, where the Russians also found work as visiting professors. The companies range from Hardide, which has developed an extra-tough coating for steel, to Intellikraft with its revolutionary new battery technology. Keronite, backed by more than $3 million of investment, provides a surface treatment that makes light metals like aluminum harder than steel. Isle Firestop has developed a fire retardant without toxic fumes. Flintstone, now valued at $20 million, experienced one setback in February. It had to pull its planned share offering on the London Stock Exchange’s Alternative Investment Market when it emerged that one of the shareholders, without Flintstone’s knowledge, was being investigated for alleged cigarette smuggling.

Woodcock’s optimism remains undiminished. He has all kinds of technologies in his sights, including a British process for printing on leather. But it’s the Russian ideas that really excite him. “We’re opening the world’s eyes to just how good these people are,” he says. Woodcock knew nothing about Russia when, in 1991, he went to Moscow to look into importing wooden pallets. Instead he brought back an idea for a water purification system. That idea is now the U.S.-owned, multimillion-dollar Sterilox Technologies.

Three years ago, Woodcock met up with Tetra, a private company launched by four former Moscow State University science professors. “We were trying to commercialize our scientific work and earn some money, though we had only a vague idea how to do it,” says physicist Pavel Shashkov, who now works at Keronite. The professors learned fast, but there was no money in Russia to take ideas forward.

Although Russia is taking steps toward creating a better business climate, it will take time, says Shashkov. Until then, Woodcock hopes to spin out two or three new companies a year, with the help of Russian technologies that, he says, “would blow anyone’s socks off.” Not in the Le Carré sense, of course.