The Foresight Fleet in Full Sail
Mid-May in Russia saw the return of what has become the flagship national brainstorming session concerning technological development - Foresight Fleet. This year, the Agency for Strategic Initiatives discussed the National Technology Initiative (NTI); its implemententation strategy and its management. The NTI is a comprehensive program of directives that will guide the leadership of Russian companies into new markets, and which is tasked with achieveving excellence for Russia on the world economic stage over the next 15-20 years. The Institute for Law and Development organised the track inside the Foresight Fleet together with the Skolkovo Foundation.
More than 700 experts from different fields - scientists, researchers, business people, government officials, and representatives of development institutions were divided into four ships – "Business", "Government", "Society" and "World" – in order to encompass all the instruments of technological support and to develop the most optimal solutions. The team at "World" was responsible for the international NTI framework for inter-country cooperation and for ensuring Russia's place in the global technological agenda.
In today's world, what matters isn't just competition between market leaders and specific players, since global competition is heavily dependent on technology as a focus, wherby technological platforms and chains are established, and they exist on the perimeter of regulation. On the global level, there are barriers impedeing access to global markets for developing countries and budding companies.
One of the key areas concerning the above is the regulation of intellectual property, which clearly matters first and foremost in the new economy – the knowledge economy. The discussion of this topic was a natural extension of the IPNet group's work. IPNet is a working group of the NTI for intellectual property, which was created in the fall of 2015 as an initiative of the Skolkovo Foundation. The Institute for Law and Development actively participates in working groups at the expert level and discusses international topics. At Foresight Fleet, the Institute's international expert panel comprised Ioannis Lianos, Professor at UCL, Chief Reasearch Officer and Head of Research Direction; Jim Chen, Professor of Law, at the University of Michigan; and an economist's perspective was presented by Pierre Régibeau, Vice-President for European Competition Practice at Charles River Associates.
In Samara on May 14 an introductory seminar was held to determine the contours of the technological policy for Russia in an international context. In the session "Regulation of Technology and Markets as a Factor For Competitiveness", Institute Director Alexey Ivanov and Jim Chen were joined by video weblink with Jerome Reichman, Professor of law at Duke University, one of the leading international experts in the field of intellectual property rights in the context of development issues.
On the first day of the Foresight Fleet, May 15, the IPNet group worked internally discussing the depths of global trends, and on May 16 it was decided to merge discussions with the group discussing BRICS, since both teams were discussing simultaneously the same topic; the development program for players of the 'peloton', who are now in the position of catching up and ultimately becoming the leadership.