At the 32nd IASP World Conference on Science Parks and Areas of Innovation in Beijing this week, registration officially opened for next year’s event, which is taking place in Moscow and being hosted by Skolkovo.
Alexander Chernov, left, with IASP chief Luis Sanz, center.
The conference is informally known as the ‘tech park Olympics’ due to its size and significance in the global science community. It is one of the premier knowledge-sharing forums in the world of science and technology parks, facilitating cooperation and collaboration among the planet’s leading research and innovation facilities.
The 2015 event opened Tuesday and at the Zhongguancun Science Park in the Chinese capital, where Skolkovo senior vice president Alexander Chernov commented on the plans for next year’s conference, to be shared between Skolkovo, MSU Science Park and Technopark Strogino.
“Never before has the Russian capital gathered together representatives of so many top-level technoparks,” Chernov noted.
“We’re expecting more than 1,500 people from hundreds of science parks around the world. And over the next year, in the run-up to the Moscow conference, it’s been proposed to increase the number of IASP member technoparks. Right now, IASP brings together almost 400 tech parks and innovation areas from 73 countries on all continents,” he added.
Chernov was in Doha at the 31st IASP conference in 2014, when the three-way Russian bid beat out competition from the Utrecht Science Park in the Netherlands and the Teknopark Istanbul.
“We demonstrated Moscow as an ecosystem that unites zones of innovation. We expect many participants from Europe, Asia, Lain America and Africa. We are going to have a very interesting program,” Chernov said.
On Wednesday, Vasily Belov, another senior VP at Skolkovo, gave a talk at a plenary session on how governments assist the global innovation process.
“The state is becoming more and more involved in developing an innovations ecosystem,” he said. “In this context, China is a successful example of creating thousands of high tech companies based at science parks set up with government support,” Belov added.