Ministry of Economic Development allocated 2014 subsidies to support pilot clusters

Pilot innovative regional clusters will receive federal funding for their development programmes for the second time. The expert commission of the Ministry of Economic Development recently completed selection of projects suggested by clusters. Like in the previous year, the preliminary selection was done via remote voting by the expert commission members at the Russian Cluster Observatory’s website. The selected projects were approved at the commission’s physical meetings.

The key difference of this year’s tender was a bigger number of clusters which have applied for subsidies: all 25 clusters included in the Ministry’s registry. The total amount of allocated federal funds also grew — from 1.3 billion roubles last year to 2.5 billion now.

Competition for public funding this year was much tougher. The ministry received 26 applications from 20 Russian regions where pilot clusters have ben created (two regions have applied for funding to support St. Petersburg Medical, Pharmaceutical and Radiation Technologies cluster’s projects — the City of St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Region). All RF regions applied for more than 5.2 billion roubles to co-fund clusters’ projects (compared with 1.9 billion roubles applied for by 13 clusters in 2013) — more than twice the amount allocated for clusters’ support in the 2014 federal budget.

If in 2013 only four regions (Tatarstan Republic, Moscow Region (Puschino), Samara Region and Tomsk Region) didn’t get the full amount of funding requested, in 2014, on the contrary, only two clusters (in Moscow Region (Dubna) and Altai Region) got all the money they applied for.

Priority projects the clusters applied for federal money to fund, remained unchanged: development of engineering centres and supporting specialised cluster organisations (primarily to upgrade skills and promote participant companies’ products on domestic and foreign markets).

Russian Cluster Observatory