Karelia session kicks off SPIEF 2018 regional offsite events

“We have created a unique event in a new format in Karelia. Our businessmen learned about the best regional practices in socioeconomic development and advanced innovative and educational projects that are being implemented in the country and in the regions, received high-quality consultations from representatives of the country’s largest development institutions, and spoke directly with leading experts. It must be noted that the site will continue to work after the forum”, Acting Head of the Republic of Karelia Artur Parfenchikov said.

One of the goals of the event is to improve skills among entrepreneurs for the use of tools for support to small- and medium-sized businesses offered by development institutions and infrastructure organizations. “We are working with the regions and entrepreneurs on creating favourable business conditions with the aim of establishing compliance practices, eliminating redundant barriers, and creating highly competitive business conditions for both foreign companies and, most importantly, for our Russian organizations. It is important to determine the conditions in which business will work comfortably”, Agency for Strategic Initiatives General Director Svetlana Chupsheva said.

The session focused heavily on work to create an open communications platform to collect and present information about state support measures for business. A fundamental agreement was reached on this at SPIEF 2017 in June. “Creating an aggregator of support measures will benefit everyone. Small and medium-sized businesses will receive the most up-to-date and complete information about state support measures via a single resource, state institutions will become much closer to entrepreneurs, and the investment climate in Russia will improve significantly. TASS is ready to help in implementing this project, including by offering the technical capabilities of the TASS-Business platform open data aggregator”, Russian News Agency TASS Deputy Chief Executive Officer and session moderator Andrey Sokolov said.

Summarizing the results of the business meeting in Karelia, Roscongress Foundation Deputy Director Shukur Israilov said the “offsite SPIEF sessions have become one of the key components for the domestic promotion of state support measures on the basis of one of the country’s most important communication platforms, which the Roscongress Foundation is. Today, this format is not only acknowledged by Russian business, but is also in demand. Such events are a bright spot in a region’s business life and help to improve business processes in a number of areas. The communications platform that has been created is truly becoming a kind of growth point for business in the region”.