News



SCIENCE FEST Science and Innovation Festival to Be Held as Part of SPIEF

SCIENCE FEST Science and Innovation Festival to Be Held as Part of SPIEF

In 2020, St. Petersburg International Economic Forum will, for the first time, host the SCIENCE FEST Science and Innovation Festival organized by the Roscongress Foundation.

The event will take place on 4–5 June at three venues: Planetarium 1, the largest one in the world; open technology lab at the planetarium; and Lumiere Hall exhibition space. The main themes of the Festival will be artificial intelligence, green economy, futurism, industry 4.0, scientific-technical creativity of youth, selection and financing of tech projects.

“The Festival’s concept is to surprise and inspire proactive people from Russia and abroad and make them fall in love with science using massive opportunities offered by the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum that brings together world’s intellectual elite. Of course, SCIENCE FEST is, first of all, for young people; it is aimed at bringing up a new generation of tech entrepreneurs in Russia, and, in this sense, it perfectly fits into the Innovation Space concept. We thus help to attract attention to many breathtaking innovative ideas and develop them in practice,” noted Chairman of the Board and CEO of the Roscongress Foundation Alexander Stuglev.

Over 15,000 people are expected to attend the event, among them SPIEF participants, residents and guests of St. Petersburg, including senior university students, young scientists and developers from various Russian regions.

The SCIENCE FEST programme will feature a cyborg conference, passenger drone test drives, robot battles, driverless car races, installations and many more. Around 50 speakers from 20 countries will take part in lectures, workshops and roundtables, among them world-class experts participating in SPIEF.

Guests will also enjoy a vast musical programme: five hours of non-stop music that is played by residents of the Burning Man festival and a headliner’s performance whose name is kept secret for now.

At the main SPIEF venue, the Innovation Space will be a part of the Building Trust Area. This unique platform brings together two Roscongress Foundation projects, Innovation Space and Innosocium LAB, and facilitates building up social agenda and establishing a dialogue between participants of innovation and social ecosystems. The Building Trust Area programme is operated by the Innosocium Foundation – the social platform of the Roscongress Foundation.

To support innovation projects, the Roscongress Foundation implements the Business Priority project. Business Priority is a new form of innovation management. Companies that obtain the Business Priority status get an access to a number of privileges, including an opportunity to directly interact with major investors and producers, as well as counselling by leading experts in finance, law, marketing and advertising. This helps significantly accelerate the product launch at Russian and international markets and increase the scale of the business and its capitalization.

Read also