Last month, Venture Business News reported that the Russian Ministry of Economic Development has approved a list of pilot programs for the development of innovation clusters that will receive financial support from the federal budget.
Out of 94 applications, an expert group within the ministry has selected 25 projects that fell into two groups. The first group includes 13 clusters with development programs that will be supported with annual $155M subsidies over the next five years, starting in 2013.
Among these 13 projects are Zelenograd and Dubna, two clusters in the Moscow region. Zelenograd specializes in IT and nuclear physics, while Dubna focuses on nanotechnology. Another cluster, in Obninsk, in the Kaluga region, focuses on pharmaceuticals, biotechnologies, and biomedicine.
The first group also includes ten other clusters from the regions of St. Petersburg, Novosibirsk, Nizhny Novgorod, Samara, Ulyanovsk, Krasnoyarsk, Tomsk and the Republic of Tatarstan.
The second group includes 12 programs that need to be improved and will not receive financial support from the state during this first stage.
