Medvedev to chair meeting on Skolkovo innovation center project

MOSCOW, April 25 (Itar-Tass) -- The Kremlin hopes that the Skolkovo
innovative center will become a popular project. Members of the Russian
presidential commission for modernization will meet with the board of
trustees of the Skolkovo Foundation on Monday to discussing how to achieve
this goal together. Russian President Dmitry Medvedev will chair this
meeting at a new IT center Digital October in downtown Moscow.
"The main expected result is a clear idea that Skolkovo will operate
at the current place unless a new nice and modern building near Moscow is
built and a clear idea what the center will bring for the scientific and
educational community," Russian presidential aide Arkady Dvorkovich told
journalists.
"We hope that the attitude to Skolkovo will change from skeptical to
positive, the center should be and will be a popular project," the Kremlin
official said.
The meeting will sum up the working results and will discuss already
dragging projects and the cooperation between the innovative center and
other organizations in Russia and abroad, Dvorkovich said. "There are
several problems, which should be solved, for instance, to apply some
advantages to the participants in the project for tax benefits and fees in
the Pension Fund and the compulsory medical insurance fund," the
presidential aide said.
According to Dvorkovich, the meeting will yield a number of
"organizational solutions," including on the ways of financing the centre.
"It is expedient to create a financial committee that will include a
representative from the Finance Ministry," he said.
The meeting will also consider the architectural design of the
would-be innovation centre that has recently won the tender. "It is a very
nice design project but it would be still nicer to adopt some elements
from rival projects," he noted. Ideally, he said, the Skolkovo center
should look like the Digital October center. "It is a real IT-park,
Skolkovo should also be surrounded by trees rather than by red bricks," he
added.
The Skolkovo center of development and commercialization of new
technologies that was called the Russian Silicon Valley was created in
March 2010. In September 2010, the Russian president signed a law that
introduced an easier tax regime for those who are cooperating with the
innovative center. The organizations, which were granted the status of a
participant in the Skolkovo project, can be exempt from the VAT tax and
the profit tax for organizations.
In the previous year, the Skolkovo Foundation approved several dozens
of projects. The leading foreign companies, universities and development
institutions already started cooperating with the Russian innovative
center. Memoranda for cooperation are planned to be signed with Novartis,
Honeywell, EADS/Airbus, Alstom, DuPont, Kodak, Schlumberger,
Johnson&Johnson, IMTECH, DOW Chemicals and John Deer, Russian Deputy Prime
Minister Sergei Ivanov said.