The Finland-Russia Cooperation: Finnish delegation visit to St. Petersburg

Published: 17.5.2008

An official FinNano delegation visited 2 ^nd International Forum "From Science to Business" in St. Petersburg, Russia on May 14 – 16, 2008. This trip was arranged as part of the activities under the official nanotechnology cooperation agreement between Finland and Russia.

2nd International Forum "From Science to Business": Business in developing innovation activity and infrastructure
"From Science to Business" is a series of annual conferences about different questions of effective and mutually beneficial cooperation between science and business.

The Second Forum is dedicated to the issues and trends of involving big, medium and small business in forming innovative economies in cooperation with scientific-educational community and state authorities.

Agenda of the forum covered main fields of activity of big, medium and small business, aimed on assistance to the innovation development of countries, emphasizing administrative organizational and legislative aspects of the development of interaction of scientific bodies and business. Special attention was received by issues of integration of small and medium innovative business into new perspective forms of relations such as the public private partnership, territorial industrial clusters, and special economic zones, with particular accent on discussion of human resource problems for the innovative projects.

To sum up, Forum provided good grounds for constructive discussion of issues and international experience in formation of the knowledge and innovation based economy. Case-studies on development and diversification of innovative economies, stimulation of processes of innovative transformations in science, education and society were presented and resulted in elaboration of recommendations on effective and mutually advantageous cooperation of authorities, business and a science with a view on introduction of innovative approaches and innovations in all life spheres.

Positive results were also obtained in initiating potential collaboration opportunities with relevant Russian academy and industry representatives and creating visibility for Finnish Nanotechnology industry sector by introducing FinNano – Finland’s national nanotechnology programme, Nanotechnology cluster OSKE, Mikkeli Technology Centre and Turku Science Park.

Finnish innovation landscape and nanotechnology initiative were introduced in a broad scope. Nanotechnology-OSKE, Miktech and Turku Science Park presented importance of networks, incubators and science parks.  

Clearly, there is considerable interest nationally in the experience and outputs from the possible Finnish-Russian cooperation and the proposed preliminary actions provide an exciting opportunity for interoperability testing on a wider scale. The potential concerns expressed regarding the cooperation will be taken into consideration before actions implementation.
The official visit has developed and implemented a model for ongoing evaluation and dissemination that encourages reflection on cooperation experiences and maximizes the benefits of possible future outputs and outcomes.

It was preliminarily agreed that co-operation would be developed further. Contacts will be maintained through e-mail and possibly through Internet and face-to-face meetings.

For more information on Finland-Russia cooperation, please contact:

FinNano Programme Manager
Markku Lämsä
Tekes
tel. +358 10 6055793
markku.lamsa@tekes.fi 

FinNano Programme Coordination
Maria Papina
Spinverse Consulting
tel. +358 40 770 0055
maria.papina@spinverse.com