Russian-Indian economic cooperation may be best known for major military hardware deals, but the future lies in the exchange of hi-tech innovations, speakers resolved at the India-Russia Startup Summit held at the Skolkovo Technopark on Tuesday.
Both Indian and Russian tech entrepreneurs attended the day-long event, together with representatives of business and development institutes in each country. Economic relations were once dominated first by wheat, tea and textiles, then by defense and nuclear technology. They are now dominated by knowledge industries, speakers noted, but Tuesday’s summit was focused firmly on the future.
“We should focus on the new things that are coming to the market: digital solutions, new materials, sensors, IOT, etc.,” said Arkady Dvorkovich, chairman of the Skolkovo Foundation.
“In those things, we should have the same standards from the very beginning to work in the same markets together on an [equal] legal footing, rather than having competing standards that will only create barriers for both sides,” he said.
In the past, differing tech standards in areas such as health and safety have posed a challenge to Russian-Indian tech transfer, Vladimir Korovkin, head of research in innovations at the Skolkovo School of Management, had already noted.
The new strategic economic dialogue between India and Russia’s Economic Development Ministry is based around five basic pillars: transportation, innovation, agriculture, the digital economy and other ideas, said Gangadharan Balasubramanian, deputy head of mission at the Indian embassy in Moscow.
“Russia has a strong R&D setup; the fundamental research Russia has done has been quite enormous, and there are a lot of things our countries can cooperate on in this particular field,” he told the summit, adding that at 1.3 billion people, the Indian market is huge.
Indian and Russian players see “huge potential” in high-tech cooperationRead More
