The director of Algeria’s National Agency for the Promotion and Development of Technoparks (ANPT) visited the Skolkovo Innovation Centre on Friday, two days after the agency and the Skolkovo Foundation signed a memorandum of cooperation during a visit to Moscow by the Algerian prime minister.
Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, left, meeting his Algerian counterpart Abdelmalek Sellal in Moscow on Wednesday, when Skolkovo and the ANPT signed a memorandum of cooperation. Photo: Government.ru.
Abdelhakim Bensaoula met with project managers from the foundation’s IT and space clusters to discuss possible ways of cooperation between Skolkovo and the ANPT, which operates four technoparks around Algeria, including one covering 100 hectares in the capital Algiers.
“When we are from different parts of the world, we have different ways of thinking about a problem and finding a solution, so we would like through our partnerships to invite startups to come and mix with our startups and share their ways of thinking so they can come up with more innovative solutions,” Bensaoula told representatives of the Skolkovo clusters.
“Most of my generation have had a lot of contact with Eastern Europe: teachers, professors and so on, and we are pushing towards rebuilding that connection,” he said, following presentations on the foundation’s IT and space clusters’ activities.
The director of the ANPT, which aims to foster the development of small and medium-size companies, as well as provide a landing ground for multinational ICT firms, said his aim in coming to Skolkovo was to establish a link and look at ways to interact and take part in each other’s events.
Dr. Anna Nikina, head of international projects at the Skolkovo Foundation, invited Bensaoula to attend the International Association of Science Parks (IASP) World Conference being held in Moscow in September, of which Skolkovo is one of the hosts. The ANPT director said he would come to the event, and added that he hoped he could use the occasion to launch the interaction by ensuring the presence of Algerian companies.
Bensaoula said he had had a very productive visit to Moscow, beginning with the memorandum on exchanging experience and developing hi-tech enterprises together signed on Wednesday by Bensaoula and Skolkovo Foundation president Viktor Vekselberg.
“Skolkovo is an amazing project,” said Bensaoula, adding that he hoped to return and see it when the innovations city, which is still under construction, is complete.
While Skolkovo divides its activities into five clusters (IT, space, biomedicine, energy and nuclear), the ANPT, founded in 2004, focuses its technoparks around ICT – but as it applies to all fields, including agriculture, energy conservation, traffic control and other spheres, said Bensaoula.
In ideology and approach, however, the state innovations programmes of Russia and Algeria are very similar, he said.
“That’s the first thing that attracted me to Skolkovo,” he said. “It’s exactly the same approach we are adopting in Algeria – a smart city oriented towards technology, towards an economy of knowledge.”
Bensaoula also drew parallels in the difficulties both countries have to overcome to modernize their economies. In Russia, decades of Communist rule under which private enterprise was illegal have created a society in which entrepreneurship is still sometimes seen as something dangerous and undesirable.
“We have the same challenges in a way, because we’ve also had a mostly socialist economy,” said Bensaoula. “So we’re not trained to accept risk or failure, and being an entrepreneur is to accept risk and also learn from failure.
“We’re trying to teach our youngsters now to say that it’s OK to take a risk,” he said. “We share the same economic history, and we’re trying to move into the next century the right way.”
Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev met his Algerian counterpart Abdelmalek Sellal in Moscow in Wednesday.
“Our discussion was a good, substantive exchange of opinions on all issues of Russia-Algeria cooperation,” Medvedev told Russian media following the talks.
“It was the first visit by the Algerian head of government to our country, at least in the post-Soviet period,” he said, adding that Algeria is one of Russia’s leading economic partners in north Africa.