Government Leaders Discussed the Russia's S&T Foresight 2030
January 20, 2014 Dmitry Medvedev discussed with Deputy Prime Ministers how to achieve the goals set in the Russia's Science and Technology Foresight 2030.
Dmitry Medvedev: Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to discuss several current issues which I consider important. In early January, I approved the foresight [editor's remark: in the cited source the document is called "forecast"] for Russia’s development in science and technology up to 2030. It took several years to complete this rather serious and large-scale work. We made use of both Russian and foreign experience. A vast number of experts, almost 2,000 experts from many countries, were involved in compiling this foresight. I hope that it will serve the country well.
On the whole, its main provisions are included in the national socioeconomic development forecast up to 2030, which was approved in March 2013. The foresight should serve as a foundation for drafting strategies and innovation programmes of major Russian companies. And, of course, those priorities which have been set forth by us over the past few years are still in place. These include energy efficiency, information technology, space exploration, transport and biomedicine. Anyway, these are, in effect, the key factors of national economic development over the next few decades. Apart from being a set of indicators, this document is also a foresight for compiling various plans, rather than just a list of goals. Ms Golodets (addressing Olga Golodets), please tell us what you and your colleagues plan to do in order to achieve these goals.
Olga Golodets: Mr Medvedev, ladies and gentlemen.
The foresight singles out all the main priorities for the development and implementation of research work. This includes the following areas: information and communications technologies; biological engineering; medicine and healthcare; new materials and nanotechnology; frugal use of natural resources; transport, space exploration, energy efficiency and energy saving technologies.
Virtually all the scientists who were involved in compiling this foresight agreed over these particular areas and priorities.
It is very important that various research budgets which currently receive funding (I would like to remind you that the country now spends 700 billion roubles annually, including 360 billion roubles’ worth of federal budget funding, on fundamental research)… The subsequent issue of research allocations will now be accompanied by organisational efforts. Our new agency, the Federal Agency for Scientific Organisations, also focuses on this issue and undertakes to organise research projects, as will leading institutions in various areas which were listed above.
A strategy and specific plans will be drafted in order to fulfill the foresight. We have already started drafting the plans, which will be submitted to the Government for approval in the first quarter of 2014. We hope that this programme will really correspond to our goals and also increase research allocations.
I would like to remind you that state financing of research is to increase from 1.2% of the GDP to 3% by 2030, and this research programme should be complemented by a meaningful agenda, which we look forward to and which we will presently set out.
Dmitry Medvedev: Strictly speaking, the priorities you and I just mentioned are not something we came up with this year, but rather, we have been working on them for a couple of years now, including within the commission on economic modernisation, so they are nothing new. It only means that these priority lines of work are the most important, and we will continue focusing our efforts on them.
But this does not mean, of course, that the development of other fields of science, including fundamental science, will stop. The idea is that in order to develop both fundamental and applied science, it is essential that we have a set of aims, so we have included them into the programme.
Source: the Russian Government website