INT Andrey Kortunov YouTube sharing

Good afternoon. Could you please introduce yourself?

Andrei Kortunov, President of the New Eurasia Foundation, Moscow.

Thank you. Could you talk about what role you see for your organization in the EURECA program?

The EURECA program involves working both in the United States and in Russia.

Our function actually consists of coordinating, managing, monitoring

and evaluating the work that happens in Russia, both in our regional universities

– including in Nizhny Novgorod and in Saint Petersburg – and in the Moscow partner organizations.

What do you envision the work of the partner universities under EURECA to be?

Well, it depends on which partner universities you’re talking about,

since we have at minimum three levels of participation.

That is, there are partner universities like ITMO and Nizhny Novgorod State University

– those are the base-level partners who are building a portfolio of modular projects

together with their partners in the United States.

There are also three universities in Moscow, each of which is going to develop its own

program; but these programs could have implications for the greater network of universities as well.

And finally, there are other universities which, although they aren’t receiving

direct financing from EURECA, could use the program’s results,

take part in various project activities, use the technologies we develop

– in general, take part in the program in one form or another.

It would be interesting to hear about ITMO and Nizhny Novgorod State University.

How will their work under the EURECA program be accomplished?

Well, it’s expected that each of these universities will prepare,

together with its American counterparts, a set of modules – that is,

concrete initiatives – each of which will correspond to a certain set of needs

in the area of business relations development. And from these sets

of modules will emerge the chain of the project, which could be long or short

– it depends on the university leadership and on how the university understands its needs.

And so with these two Russian universities there will be four American universities:

University of Maryland, Purdue, UCLA and the University of Washington.

So it works out that each Russian university gets two American partners.

We hope that this will allow them to have a fairly varied set

of opportunities, and will create a diversified pilot project.

I see. And after the first modular projects have been implemented,

will this experience be shared with other 29 national universities?

Well, we would like to hope for that. We’d like to believe that the results

of our activities over the next two years will later serve as the basis

for a sort of network cooperation – that is, that we’ll end up with packaged

finished projects for further dissemination. It’s still too early to be talking about that,

since, strictly speaking, we haven’t gotten to the pilot stage yet,

but we hope that in January it will be officially launched.

And what sort of financing is there for the pilot projects?

This will depend on the specifics of the projects, because in principal

the US-Russia Foundation has said that they could allocate around

2 million dollars per year per project. The budgets of concrete initiatives within

the framework of the program will be formed based on that allocation.

And if you could comment on the future of tech transfer in Russia – how do you imagine

its development, and what role do you see for university research in social and economic growth?

Well, those are big questions. Of course, we’d like for the role of the university

in social and economic development to grow, and it seems to us that the foundation

for this has been laid. The universities, for instance, possess an array

of competencies, a set of qualities that are in demand on the level or regional

development. Therefore the university could become, I’d say, a natural partner for

the regional administration, municipal power structures, big and not-so-big business,

and also become a center of social life. The university itself and

the Ministry of Education will determine this, as will, of course, financial realities.

That is, universities must seek new sources of financing and become comfortable

in new educational, scientific and expert markets. This is not easy,

but it’s necessary. As for tech transfer in general, of course this question is bigger

than the universities. Society must become innovative. That is, society must create

a stimulus for such innovations, for the transition to a knowledge economy.

This is also a complicated task, and of course the force of a single program

isn’t enough to solve such a problem, but we will do what we can.

Thank you so much for your commentary.

Thank you.

All the best.