On June 21-23, 2017, the international conference ‘Rising Powers and Interdependent Futures’ was held in Manchester, the UK. Mikhail Gershman, the Head of the Centre for Innovation Policy Studies at the Higher School of Economics, presented his report on the current directions of Russian science and technology policy.

Of biotechnology company executives complain about the insufficiently low inflow of young professionals. This figure is presented in the newsletter “Biotechnology: organisations’ demand for R&D personnel and skills” published in the HSE ISSEK series “Science, Technology, and Innovation”.

Two international summits took place in Beijing (China) on 6-9 June 2017: the Eighth Clean Energy Ministerial Meeting (CEM8), and the Second Ministerial Meeting on Innovation (Mission Innovation, MI-2). The events’ shared theme was meeting global challenges with innovations and designing common clean energy solutions. Liliana Proskuryakova, the Leading Researcher at the HSE ISSEK Research Laboratory for Science and Technology Studies, was a member of the official Russian delegation.

The HSE ISSEK experts compared data about the application of technological, marketing, and organisational innovations by the Russian knowledge-intensive business services sector (KIBS) companies with relevant figures for European countries such as the UK, Germany, Denmark, Malta, the Netherlands, and Switzerland. The results are presented in the latest newsletter in the "Science, Technology, and Innovation" series.

Gulnara Abdrakhmanova, Director of the HSE ISSEK Centre for Statistics and Monitoring of Information Society, and Olga Demidkina, Leading Expert at the OECD-HSE Partnership Centre took part in the OECD Digital Week (15—19 May, Paris). Its focal point was the meeting of the OECD Committee on Digital Economy Policy, which is responsible for a major OECD project “Going Digital”. The participants have also discussed preparation of the Digital Outlook report.

Of Russians aged between 25-64 are engaged in self-education, mainly by reading books and magazines relevant to their profession (10%), via the internet (4,8%), and learning from colleagues at work (3,9%). These figures were obtained through a representative survey conducted by the HSE ISSEK (the sample comprised 1,156 people aged 25—64), and published in the new statistical yearbook “Indicators of Education 2017”.

The HSE ISSEK released its fifth Russian Regional Innovation Ranking at a press conference hosted by TASS. Almost half Russia’s regions are relatively stable in terms of innovative development: their positions in the ranking have not changed significantly. The Republic of Tatarstan, followed by Moscow and St. Petersburg, tops the Ranking.

On June 15, 2017, the tenth Global Innovation Index was presented at the UN headquarters in Geneva. It includes the key indicators of innovative activities in 127 countries. Russia took 45th place in the ranking. Switzerland is leading the ranking for the seventh year in a row. Leonid Gokhberg, Director of HSE ISSEK, is a member of the GII Advisory Board and provides advice on the research underlying the index. He co-authored the analytical report that traditionally accompanies the index with ISSEK researcher Ilya Kuzminov.