A working group in charge of developing the ecosystem of creative entrepreneurship and service economy in Russia held a meeting in Khanty-Mansiysk on 21 November. The meeting addressed the methods and tools required to form a creative environment and support the freedom of creativity.
The Agency for Strategic Initiatives (ASI) and the Roscongress Foundation are using their joint toolkit to shape a creative ecosystem that brings together representatives of the government, business, NPOs, educational institutions, and the professional community. The ASI provides creative entrepreneurs with opportunities to accelerate projects, search for partners and favourable financing terms, identify priority problems, and eliminate barriers to development. The Roscongress Foundation’s capabilities help to build a dialogue with the government, specialized experts, and business as well as scale best practices at major international economic forums. The unique collaboration between the ASI and Roscongress Foundation within the working group creates the best opportunities for replicating successful experience in Russia’s regions.
“We need to pay special attention to developing the regions’ capabilities for people’s creative self-realization. Comfortable conditions for life and creativity provide people with the advantage to realize themselves to the fullest. This requires improvements to training, support for projects in creative industries, the development of creativity from childhood, and the creation of intellectual property generating centres,” said Elena Marinina, Deputy CEO of the Roscongress Foundation and Chair of the ASI working group in charge of developing the ecosystem of creative entrepreneurship and service economy in Russia.
The working group meeting was attended by Deputy Minister of Industry and Trade of the Russian Federation Gulnaz Kadyrova, Deputy Minister of Science and Higher Education of the Russian Federation Elena Druzhinina, Khanty-Mansi Autonomous District – Yugra Governor Natalya Komarova, ASI General Director Svetlana Chupsheva, Deputy CEO of the Roscongress Foundation and Chair of the ASI working group in charge of developing the ecosystem of creative entrepreneurship and service economy in Russia Elena Marinina as well as heads of creative enterprises and representatives of business, public organizations, and NPOs.
The creative approach is globally recognized as a key condition for competitive advantage, growth factor, and a driving force for socioeconomic development. Creative industries remain one of the priority themes in discussions on Russia’s economic development.
“The main goal of our work is to create favourable conditions for doing business and to come up with effective mechanisms to support new projects to develop creative industries. This is the sector that may become one of the drivers of economic growth in Russia in the very near future,” Chupsheva said.
The working group meeting cited priority tasks as promoting collaboration between departments and within creative industries as well as between creative industries, folk arts and crafts, museums, and other industries and conducting an analysis to determine demand for the development of creative industries in the regions. The group noted the need to create a working group under the Russian Federal State Statistics Service (Rosstat) and organize systematic work between the Russian Ministry of Culture, the ASI, Rosstat, the RANEPA, and the expert community to develop methods to determine the boundaries of the creative economy and its statistical accounting system, including in order to correctly determine the size and description of its contribution to GDP and GRP. The group also decided to pay special attention to the branding of territories to reflect the identity of the regions in order to attract investors and develop tourism.
“The Khanty-Mansi Autonomous District is a land of pioneering, strong, and talented people with a distinctive and creative cultural code. In our region, the Russian government is holding an international festival of creative industries in cooperation with international organizations. The event is being held under the auspices of the Russian Commission for UNESCO and the Northern Forum and under the chairmanship of the Russian Federation in the Arctic Council in 2021–2023. The meeting of the working group is one of the main events of the international festival.
The United Nations General Assembly has declared 2021 the International Year of the Creative Economy for Sustainable Development. To this end, major work is underway to assess the impact of creative industries on the development of states and peoples, and one of the main conclusions of this work is that creative industries are among the most dynamically developing sectors of the economy and have great potential for growth.
The Russian government has approved a concept for the development of creative industries until 2030. Prime Minister of the Russian Federation Mikhail Mishustin has stressed that this is another important tool to achieve the national goals set by the Russian President.
“A priority task is to create conditions for people in which they can realize their potential, monetize it, and increase the proportion of creative entrepreneurship in all sectors of the economy and, ultimately, in the gross domestic product,” Komarova said.
Presidential Fund for Cultural Initiatives General Director Roman Karmanov supported Komarova. Speaking about measures to support the development of creative and creative projects at the federal level, he noted: “There is great demand for support: the total amount of the grant competition was RUB 3.5 billion, and the total estimates of the projects that were submitted was RUB 84.5 billion, while another RUB 22 billion was declared as co-financing, i.e., the authors of these ideas are ready to invest their resources or attract them for the project. It’s also important that this would be money invested in the regions and that these are resources that would help talented people develop in their home cities.”
The final resolution of the working group’s meeting included decisions to study the most popular professions in creative industries, analyse educational programmes at universities in terms of their relevance, expand economic activities to create special economic zones, replicate the rebate programme in the regions, and create investment programmes to fund creative industries.