Closing Russia's 'innovation gap'
Government officials, scientists and business people from Russia and several OECD (Organisation for economic cooperation and development) Member countries and non Member countries met in Helsinki on 1 to 2 March in order to examine the climate for innovation in Russia. The conference was organised by the OECD, the Ministry of Trade and industry in Finland, the United States Civilian R&D Foundation, INTAS and the Russian Federation's Ministry of Industry, science and technologies. During the conference, participants from Canada, France, Germany, Hungary, Israel, Italy, Korea, the United Kingdom and the United States as well as the Newly Independent States (NIS) discussed possibilities for enhancing the contribution of science and technology to Russia's innovation and growth. Russia's 'innovation gap' could widen if institutional reforms are not taken to link the emerging innovation infrastructure to the science system and the development of a domestic market, conference delegates concluded. Russia's innovation system is developing in a piecemeal fashion, the attendees agreed. Institutional rigidities as well as inefficient and distorted patterns of R&D funding and performance prevail, which were inherited from the Soviet Union. Incentives for investment in innovation and incentives for innovative small firms are essential, concluded the conference participants, who asserted that governments should play an active but limited role in fostering innovation. One role should be to encourage further engagement between public research institutions and industry. Support should focus on bottlenecks in the innovation system, state the policy messages drawn from the conference. 'Governments should shy away from building wholesale innovation support structure, but retain a flexible mix of programmes that should be evaluated, benchmarked and adjusted,' states the document. Attention should also be paid to creating strong and stable intellectual property rights, mobilising Russia's stock of human resources and increasing the share of domestic funds dedicated to innovation and entrepreneurship, delegates agreed. Since 1991, the EU has supported Russia's economic and democratic reform process with approximately 200 million euro per year from the Tacis (technical assistance) programme. Tacis funding is allocated through national, regional and small projects programmes.