Does Russia have any federal initiatives to develop/import technologies?

In July 2008, President Dmitry Medvedev chaired a session of the Presidium of the State Council of the Russian Federation devoted to government strategy for 'information society' development. Medvedev set a deadline for the Russian government to complete the creation of new administrative rules to facilitate electronic circulation of documents. This was in support of its target of mainly electronic document circulation by 2010.

Special Focus: IT Parks The 'technopark' programme is the government's flagship policy for development of the IT sector (see Industry Developments). The main construction phase began in 2007, with a federal budget of around US$74.68mn initially assigned for the project, which is being co-ordinated by the Federal Agency for IT (see below). A new phase of funding for 2008-2010 worth some US$850mn was announced in 2007. The 'technoparks' were initially intended to be exclusively 'IT Parks', but are now actually open to enterprises in other sectors such as nano- and bio-technology, as well as IT. A plan was approved in March 2006 to construct the parks in seven regions, and the parks were expected to employ 19,000 people by 2008 and some 75,000 by 2011. Investment will be US$985mn, and the Russian IT and communications minister, Leonid Reiman, predicted that the output of the technoparks would be US$749mn by 2008, reaching US$4.4bn by 2011. So far, the St Petersburg project is the most advanced.

Russia Information Technology Report Q2 2009

From Business monitor international