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Medvedev to attend session of Skolkovo Board of Trustees

MOSCOW, December 11, 1:10 /ITAR-TASS/. Russia's Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev will visit Skolkovo on Wednesday, the government press service reported. The Head of Government will chair a session of the Board of Trustees of the Skolkovo Foundation in Hypercube -- the science city's main building -- to review efforts being made to implement a project for establishing an innovation center.

Vice-Premier Arkady Dvorkovich, Assistant to the President Andrei Fursenko, a number of Cabinet ministers, Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin, Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS) Head Vladimir Fortov, VEB (foreign economic bank) chief Vladimir Dmitriyev, as well as executives of domestic and foreign companies will take part in the session.

Efforts to establish a Skolkovo innovation center have been in progress since September 2010 on the initiative of Dmitry Medvedev who was then the president of the country. The purpose of the future innovation center was announced to be summoning up resources in the field of innovative research and creating favourable conditions for scientific development efforts in five priority fields: power engineering and energy efficiency, space research, biomedicine, nuclear and computer technologies.

Research institutes and business incubators, a center for transfer of technlogies and commercialization, the representative offices of foreign companies, residential premises and social infrastructure are to be located in the grounds of the innovation center.

Skolkovo's Open University started working in April 2011. Later on, a Skolkovo Science and Technology Institute (Skolkovotech) enrolled its first students. The Skolkovotech was established with support and partnership of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

By December this year, the status of participants in the Skolkovo project was granted to 1,019 companies, and about 13,000 high-tech jobs have been created. In the process, as government materials point out, big transnational corporations account for more than a half of the Foundation's 30 key partners that are planning to open their research centers there. Almost 70 venture funds have signed accreditation agreements with Skolkovo to a sum totaling more than 24 billion roubles.

A government official emphasized that the innovation center development strategy "has been harmonized with the tasks of sophisticating the economy of the Russian Federation".

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