OREANDA-NEWS. April 7, 2011. Vnesheconombank Chairman Vladimir Dmitriev conducted a meeting of the Coordinating Council on Implementing the Agreement on Cooperation between Development Institutions and Interested Organizations in the Continuous Financing of SME Innovation Projects at all Stages of Innovation Cycle.

In the course of the meeting its participants summarized the work undertaken in 2010. For example, more than 70 innovation projects worth more than 20 billion rubles were handed over to development institutions for monitoring. Most projects are the ones at an early stage of implementation. The Working Group on implementing the Agreement held 6 meetings at which they approved action plans and discussed thoroughly specific innovation projects. In order to increase the flow of projects going through different stages of innovation lift, an information base on all projects supported by development institutions is to be formed until the end of April of 2011.

Under the Coordinating Council’s decision the Foundation for Development of the Skolkovo Center for Research and Commercialization of New Technologies joined the Agreement as a full party to the Agreement.

The meeting’s participants also pointed out development institutions’ efforts to create new instruments for supporting innovation companies. Specifically, a new product “Financing for Innovations and Modernization” was developed as part of Vnesheconombank’s Program of Providing Financial Support for Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises. The product is designed to make debt financing more affordable for emerging innovation SMEs.

Members of the Coordinating Council made a decision to carry on creating special sectoral funds as well as form consolidated expert pools on high priority lines of modernization: energy efficiency and resource saving, nuclear technologies, strategic computer technologies, space technologies and telecommunications, medical equipment and pharmaceutics.

The meeting’s participants spoke unanimously in favor of working out a joint action plan for development institutions to develop investment mechanisms, raise foreign venture capital for Russia and gain expertise in managing innovation projects and implement programs of training personnel for the innovation economy.

Agreement on Cooperation between Development Institutions and Interested Organizations in Securing the Continuous Financing of Innovation Projects at all Stages of Innovation Cycle was signed on Vnesheconombank’s initiative exactly a year ago on April 6, 2010. The Agreement’s main goal is to form an organizational mechanism to gradually hand over projects to development institutions for monitoring (with due regard to a project’s implementation stage).

The parties to the Agreement are State Corporation ‘Bank for Development and Foreign Economic Affairs (Vnesheconombank)’, RUSNANO, the Russian Venture Company, the Russian Development Bank, the Fund for Supporting Small Enterprises in Scientific and Technological Sphere), as well as the Moscow Interbank Currency Exchange, non-government organizations (such as OPORA ROSSII, the Russian Venture Investment Association) and the Federal Agency for Youth Affairs.

The Coordinating Council is comprised of heads of companies, which are parties to the Agreement. For the most part the coordinating Council seeks to identify top priority lines of cooperation between Russian development institutions and work out a common position on crucial issues of innovation development.