Moscow School of Management SKOLKOVO with active participation of SKOLKOVO Institute for Emerging Market Studies (SKOLKOVO IEMS) served as an intellectual partner of the Russian-Chinese forum – 2015 “Big opportunities for Small and Medium-sized Business”, which took place on the 21-22nd of April in Beijing. The Forum was opened by Zhang Gaoli, current first-ranked Vice Premier of the PRC, and Arkady Dvorkovich, Deputy Prime Minister of Russia. The Agenda of the forum included presentation of the investment potential of the Russian regions as well as discussion of cooperation projects in the SME sector, with a particular attention to collaboration in such industries as innovations, tourism and media. Over 500 companies and representatives of regional administrations attended the event. Alexey Kalinin, IEMS Director, made a presentation “Russian-Chinese Complementarity in Small and Medium Innovations”. In his talk, he stressed that Russian and Chinese SME business has big potential in collaboration, especially in the high-tech industry. Specifically, Russian strong scientific school offers a good foundation for development of innovative and globally-competitive products. The Chinese firms, on the other hand, are traditionally adept at commercialization and scaling up. It is the cross-section of the two that creates opportunities of complementarity and collaboration between Russian and Chinese SME business.
