In autumn 2019, the Fund for Assistance to Small Innovative Enterprises in Science and Technology launched the annual grant competition under the program Participant of the Youth Research and Innovation Competition (UMNIK), in which any citizen of the Russian Federation aged from 18 to 30 years (inclusive) who had not previously won this competition could take part. The winners receive a grant of 500 thousand rubles to conduct R&D work with the prospect of commercialization. The grant is given for 2 years, although a shorter R&D period is also permitted.

A total of 951 projects were supported by the Fund, and two representatives of EKRA were among the winners: Nikolay Ivanov with the project “Development of a controlled recloser for long overhead transmission lines with shunt reactors” and Aleksey Fedorov with the project “Development of a one-way wave fault locator for power transmission lines.”

Both winners work at the Power System Automation Department and are also involved in post-graduate training: Nikolay as an assistant at the A. A. Fedorov Department of Electric Power Supply and Intelligent Electric Power Systems and a doctorate student of Vladislav Ivanovich Antonov, PhD; Aleksey as a second-year master's student at the Department of Power Engineering and Electrical Engineering.

Their lives are about to get more exciting: they have 24 months to do research work on the declared topic, develop a business plan for the innovative project, register intellectual property rights, and complete a pre-acceleration program at the company.

The UMNIK competition has been held since 2010, and since its inception dozens of devices have been developed and hundreds of ideas have been implemented. For example, a doctorate student of the Northern Arctic Federal University is developing a mobile solar power plant to operate in arctic conditions, and a graduate of the Faculty of Chemistry at the Irkutsk State University is working on a reagent to increase the accuracy of blood glucose level measurements.