Vladimir Putin Has Innovations of His Own // Why the Agency for Strategic Initiatives Is Being Created Under the Head of GovernmentAs Kommersant has learned, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s statement at a United Russia interregional conference about creating the Agency for Strategic Initiatives (ASI) is backed by a plan being developed in the White House (the Russian government building) to roll out by 2012 a government system for supporting innovation, parallel to the president’s existing “innovation” infrastructure. ASI is expected to receive the status of a state agency by 2012, taking over some functions of the Ministry of Economic Development and the Ministry of Education and Science, coordinating the work of “innovation” units in most ministries, and overseeing a number of state scientific programs and federal targeted programs. For now, the project is at the very earliest stage of implementation—it will operate on a voluntary basis. open article… However, as a source in one of the presidential innovation structures familiar with the project explained to Kommersant, “the question of giving ASI the status of at least the main innovation institution is already settled.” According to him, the ideology of Vladimir Putin’s innovation plan has largely taken shape. “The president’s innovation projects, in particular the Skolkovo Foundation (Russia’s flagship state-backed tech hub), will be pushed into the background,” Kommersant’s source believes. “All regulatory and financial flows for new projects are supposed to converge on ASI precisely by 2012, when the redistribution of funds and agency functions begins ahead of the elections.” I’m not going to mourn too much—this whole “Skolkovo” thing is an obvious scam. There’s just one problem: the key phrase “all financial flows will converge” translated from the language of the power vertical into plain Russian means “we’ll steal twice as much.” Now they’ll start competing before the elections: We’ve put torsion fields to work for Russia’s defense capability. Give us a billion rubles. And we invented a gravitsapa (a fictional sci-fi gadget from the Soviet cult film Kin-dza-dza!). Give us two. And we’ve got a nano-gravitsapa. Give us three. And we’ve got a nano-gravitsapa that’s half the size, three times faster, and invented by young scientists from Seliger (the pro-Kremlin youth camp/forum). Give us eight. It’s the money I feel sorry for.
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