Vladislav Surkov, First Deputy Chief of Staff, reported that it was Dmitry Medvedev’s idea to create an innovation valley: on December 31, the president ordered the formation of a working group. Medvedev announced in Tomsk that an innovation center – not Silicon Valley, but a prototype of the city of the future, a test site for new economic policy.
The president’s order designated the new facility as a territorially separate center for advancing research and develop and commercializing the result. The working group was headed by Surkov, Medvedev’s deputy on the presidential modernization commission. Surkov’s group also included Assistants to the President Arkady Dvorkovich and Larisa Brycheva; officials of the Ministry of Finance, Ministry of Economic Development, Ministry of Industry and Trade and the Ministry of Education and Science at the deputy minister level; and Governor of Moscow Region Boris Gromov. From what Surkov said, the most discussed option for locating the new center is just outside Moscow. The general contractor of the project is Rosnano, and its General Director, Anatoly Chubais, is a member of the group.
Rosnano will be responsible for organizational and technical support of the working group according to a source in the corporation; it may also be made responsible for summarizing the proposals from all parties interested in creating an innovation city, as the working group calls this facility.
As Surkov explains, there will be two phases to the project. In the spring, its innovation products, preliminarily selected by the commission, will be “cultivated” in clusters of large private companies. Then the most promising products will be selected and transplanted to the valley, which will start being developed at the end of the year. Applications are being accepted only from large companies – from those whose executives were present at the meeting in Tomsk.
The project selection criterion is scale, Chubais confirmed in Tomsk: for example, so that sales of the new product could reach 15 billion rubles by 2015. By then, he calculated, the first 10 selected projects could yield output of innovation products worth 100-200 billion rubles by 2015, and if they are put onto an assembly line and output 10 such project annually, this will yield up to 1 trillion rubles in annual output in the same time.
As one of its members explained, in order to deposit the amount required to develop the innovation city in the 2011 budget, the commission is insisting that applications be received from business as soon as possible. Surkov’s group will be accepting proposals until April 1, and the commission will consider the selected projects in May. To begin with, Surkov said, about 4 billion of the 10 billion rubles reserved in the 2010 budget for the modernization commission will go towards supporting projects and planning the valley.
In Surkov’s words, projects are being accepted only in five lines of modernization, which the presidential commission is working on: energy efficiency and energy savings; nuclear technologies; space technologies; medical technologies, and strategic information technologies. The commission decided in Tomsk that the government’s share in co-financing should not exceed 50% and that state corporations would be take part in co-financing. Elvira Nabiullina, the Minister of Economic Development, promised organizational support, project promotion and a special mode of operation. Surkov made it clear that this will include special tax treatment.
