Vadim Kulikov, the Director of the Innovation Center and honored inventor of Russia summed up the work of the discussion group: “Business: are entrepreneurs ready for the new quality of growth?”.
The Seventh Krasnoyarsk Economic Forum completely changed its strategy. The organizers tried to move to a new format of a “creative hot spot” where new knowledge is born.
The key topic of the discussion group “Business: are entrepreneurs ready for the new quality of growth?” was the question “what must business do to start the processes of modernization in the country?”. The discussion group was divided into six round tables, and the participants of each of them formulated their position with respect to the problem being discussed.
The results were proposals for solving this problem, which were presented on February 13 at the concluding plenary session of the VII Krasnoyarsk Economic Forum:
“In the first session, we singled out two main blocks that are severely hampering the process of modernization. These are competition and professionalism. We made the following decision by majority vote: in order to have competition, Russia must become a member of the World Trade Organization; this is quite important for Russia. Of course, we also discussed other problems – depreciation and patent protection – but we believe that the issue of accession to the WTO is fundamental. The second point is the problem of implementing innovations through government procurement: under the law on government procurement, it is outright impossible for municipal and regional governments and state corporations to buy innovation through government procurement; thus, there is no comparison, and we cannot participate in competition in good faith the existing products. Therefore, if possible, we believe it is still necessary to introduce a concept such as “total cost of ownership”, not just ”price”, into the law on government procurement,” Kulikov said.
