Transcript of the beginning of the meeting:

Vladimir Putin: Mr. Nikitin, as I understand it, the staff and the structure of the Strategic Initiative Agency have already been decided on. The most important step, however, is to begin work on selecting and managing projects. What is your progress on that?

Andrei Nikitin: The team has already been put together. We are currently engaged in an active dialogue with the experts, discussing objectives and tasks and planning to meet some of the objectives during this and the next year. They will be introduced at the supervisory council meeting.    

So far we have been selecting projects in a manual regime. From two thousand projects available on the website, we are creating a portfolio approved by the advisory board that will be presented at the supervisory council meeting. At this point our portfolio includes some very interesting projects in agriculture, high tech and in the processing industry. There is a section containing interesting social projects that cover practically all age groups, as well as projects under the Young Professionals heading. There is also a project that was created as a result of our discussion at the Innoprom-2011 Exhibition (held in Yekaterinburg on July 14-17, 2011). It has already been launched in one of the regions and has promising prospects nationwide.   

In addition, we are now working on the directives you issued in Sochi. We have met with business leaders in Yekaterinburg, Novosibirsk, and St Petersburg. We have been discussing the requirements for regional investment and development management, meeting with leaders of successful regional development agencies and closely monitoring our progress to assure a measurable outcome. We have, of course, been consulting with Delovaya Russia that developed the model that we plan to use as our foundation.

As far as regional objectives are concerned, we signed collaboration agreements with the Sverdlovsk and Novosibirsk regions to create a partnership. We consider the regional network as a partnership, since it is crucial that we engage regional development agencies, the academic community and social activists. In the regions, we should use all of the resources available to us.      

In general, we are preparing all of the paperwork. We have drafted an important provision on selection and assessment procedures for projects and initiatives. It follows a particular logic, which means that we won’t stretch ourselves too thin by trying to cover every direction, but rather focus the work of the agency on the projects and initiatives themselves.

We are now in the final stages of drafting proposals for the advisory council.

Vladimir Putin: How many members of the advisory board are there?

Andrei Nikitin: We plan to have 50 members working in four or even five areas: agency strategy, agency initiatives, New Business, Young Professionals and Social Initiatives.   

Vladimir Putin: We have already met a few of the advisory board candidates. Will the board include people who participated in the competition?

Andrei Nikitin: Certainly, 25 finalists (24 not including myself) will become first members of the council. From the first day on they have been actively involved in the projects. Practically every day I receive their proposals on the scope of the agency’s work, drafted in accordance with their perspective on the objectives and tasks of the agency. We stay in contact and integrate their proposals into the agency’s general mission and into our objectives. 

Vladimir Putin: When will you be ready to meet and talk?

Andrei Nikitin: I believe that next week we will make all of the decisions on the advisory board and in the very near future we will be ready to discuss it at the supervisory board meeting, perhaps around October 20, 2011.     

Vladimir Putin: Good.