IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Magazine - March 2019 - 72

and instructor. In 2016, he started
his Ph.D. research, which focuses on
strategic aspects of the links between
FEaTUrE
early stage technological start-ups,
rWL
380-470 nm, starting from visible purple and ending at nir
venture capital, and intellectual propNumber of spectral channels
From three to six channels: rGB + red-edge (optional) + nir
erty rights.
(optional) + Pan (optional)
zeljko Tekic (z.tekic@skoltech
SPr
Better than Lr; smaller than 30 m/pixel
.ru) received his Ph.D. degree in inLaunch mass of satellite
5-100 kg (i.e., nanosatellite and microsatellite classes)
dustrial engineering and engineering
Total launch mass, needed to
75-120 kg
management from the University of
be placed in orbit
Novi Sad, Serbia, his M.Sc. degree in
Number of satellites, needed to
From 5 to 20 distinct objects
entrepreneurship from the Univerbe placed in orbit
sity of Nottingham, United Kingdom,
and his M.Sc.degree in electrical and
computer engineering from the University
of
Novi
Sad.
Tekic
is an assistant professor at the Censervices (some of which are free) have a large influence on
ter for Entrepreneurship and Innovation, Skolkovo Institute
the attractiveness of what EO start-ups propose. The siof Science and Technology, Moscow. Recently, he was a visitmultaneous analyses of both parties-start-ups and large
ing professor and researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of
commercial or institutional participating in EO marTechnology, Cambridge. His research interests include intelket-is a complex task and a subject of the future work.
lectual property, start-ups, and open innovation. He is a pasThe second critical limitation of our methodology is its
sionate teacher, researcher, and start-up mentor.
inability to reach a high statistical significance for the results presented here. Although we, to the best of our knowlAlessandro Golkar (a.golkar@skoltech.ru) received his
edge, collected publicly available data on all EO start-ups,
master's and bachelor's degrees in aerospace engineering
their missions and satellites used, their total number is
from Università di Roma "La Sapienza" and his Ph.D. desmall and not sufficient for statistical analyses. This is due
gree in aeronautics and astronautics from the Massachuto the number of EO start-ups currently in the market and
setts Institute of Technology, Cambridge. He is an associate
to the limited technical data publicly available on their
professor at the Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technolsatellite systems. It is not possible at the present time to
ogy, Moscow. His research interests include new ways of
statistically prove the described trends or apply other more
looking at complex systems architecting problems, undersophisticated analysis techniques.
standing the evolution of technology, and developing reAnother limitation comes from the nondisclosure charsearch and demonstrations of novel space mission concepts
acter of the financial information of start-ups. We develand spacecraft payload systems.
oped a method, based on the average estimation of shares
being given to VC in related rounds, to determine data
REfERENCES
about valuations during different rounds of investment.
[1] D. Selva and D. Krejci, "A survey and assessment of the capabiliThis is meant, however, to be a first-order approximation.
ties of Cubesats for Earth observation," Acta Astronaut, vol. 74,
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Possible scenarios and impacts," Acta Astronaut, vol. 137, pp.
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pp. 1-12, 2010.

TaBLE 6. a cOmBINaTION OF ThE TEchNIcaL FEaTUrES OF aN EO mISSION
ThaT haS aBOvE-avEraGE chaNcES FOr SUccESS ON ThE marKET.

AUTHOR INfORMATION
Maksim Malyy (maksim.malyy@skoltech.ru) received his
aerospace engineer's degree in 2012 from the Baltic State
Technical University "VOENMEKH," St. Petersburg, Russia,
and is currently a Ph.D. student at the Innovation and Intellectual Property Laboratory, Center for Entrepreneurship
and Innovation, Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology, Moscow. He worked as an analyst in start-up accelerator and venture fund iDealMachine and contributed to
several start-up acceleration programs as a mentor, advisor,
72

[4] P. Gompers, W. Gornall, S. N. Kaplan, and I. A. Strebulaev,
"How do venture capitalists make decisions?" Stanford Univ.
Gra duate School of Business, CA, Res. Pap. No. 16-33.
Accessed on: June 15, 2017. [Online]. Available: https://ssrn
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57, no. 1, pp. 169-197, 2002.
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IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Magazine - March 2019

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