The Final Event of the Ecotourism Accelerator: Investment Pitching

9 November, 2020

Today, on November 9, the Kommuna Boiling Point (Tochka Kipeniya) co-working space hosted the final event of the Ecotourism Accelerator: an investment pitching session which welcomed over 100 representatives of business communities, development institutions, and potential investors. The attendees watched and evaluated demonstrations of 19 designs for tourist and recreational cluster prepared by the competing teams over the course of three months.

Each investment pitching guest was able to ask the teams questions, evaluate the investment potential of the projects ready for execution, learn about government support measures, and choose a prospective partner and negotiate with them on mutually beneficial terms. The potential investors approached the task with great diligence, bombarding the teams with in-depth questions about the number of projects in their portfolio and about the environment that these projects created for Russian and foreign investors: small, medium, and major businesses alike. The potential for developing resorts and the surrounding areas, their accessibility to a broad range of users, the presence of anchors for Tourist and Recreational Clusters (TRCs), and support from local authorities were just a few of the issues raised by the Accelerator attendees.

After learning more about all the projects, the guest experts warned the competition winners that they had some very hard work ahead of them, particularly when it comes to addressing the objective oversights that the business community noticed during the investment pitches. Olga Zakharova, head of the ecotourism development office and deputy director of the Agency for Strategic Initiatives, noted that ecotourism would not exist without the business community. The event organizers confirmed that all the business guests of the investment pitching session would receive more detailed follow-up information on each project, as well as the project presentations for further study.

An overview of the teams’ proposals, along with a collection of photographs from the event, is available on the project website, priroda.life.

The Competition and Accelerator were organized by the Agency for Strategic Initiatives. The Agency for Strategic Development CENTER is the Competition Operator and the developer of the Accelerator.

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