Russia in Global Affairs

Russian enterprises for years have ignored innovative potentialities of R&D and academic science and are now far behind their foreign counterparts. There is no lack of equipment, but – and this is much worse – the lagging behind has perpetuated existing organizational structures in management.

A unified Euro-Russian innovation market is capable of ensuring a multiplication effect for any individual investor. Instead of an integrated European energy grid, which has been suggested by the European Union as an artificial incentive for competition, it would be better to create an integrated Euro-Russian innovation network.

The obsession with grand scale projects is as damaging to the idea of innovative economic zones as the trend towards small-budget minimalism. For example, the projects to set up Science Towns provide for all kinds of measures – from improving the public transport infrastructure to developing pedestrian walkways in neighborhoods. Just one thing is missing: a program to build effective cooperation between research centers and private business companies.

Despite considerable efforts to liberalize the economic system and the laws regulating relations between the authorities and economic agents, the nation still pins great hopes on the government as almost the only institution that can ensure that public interests are duly observed. These ideas should not be fought against, no matter how illusory they may seem, but guided into a productive vein.

The scope of Russia’s potential partners in the Arab world has grown sizably after the ideological element vanished from Russian-Arab relations. Economic interests, together with all of the economic benefits that go with it, necessitate the establishment of contacts with all countries in the region that are ready to cooperate in practical terms.

Russia’s economic and political influence in the world can increase only if it moves investment from the raw materials sector into high technologies. The present orientation of the Russian economy to the export of raw materials may make it a “colossus with feet of clay.”