SPIEF 2012: Interview with Artem Avetisyan, Agency for Strategic Initiatives

Last year, Vladimir Putin, then-prime minister, announced the creation of the Agency for Strategic Initiatives (ASI), tasked with improving the entrepreneurial environment and improving the dialogue between business and government. Three young entrepreneurs were selected from thousands of applicants to head ASI’s three branches: New Business, Young Professionals and Social Projects. On the second day of SPIEF, Modern Russia met Artem Avetisyan, Director of the New Business branch, to find out more about the agency’s work.

What are your impressions of SPIEF so far? What messages are you bringing here?

I have come to this forum for many years as an entrepreneur. This is, however, my first time here as the head of the New Business branch of the Agency for Strategic Initiatives. SPIEF is a great platform, where both entrepreneurs and investors and government officials gather and find common ground. This is how we see one of the tasks of ASI – to be the bridge between business and government, support entrepreneurs and remove the administrative barriers they encounter when doing business in Russia.    

The Agency was created at President Putin’s initiative. What was its main purpose? How would you describe the main tasks and activities of the Agency?

The fact that ASI was created with the support of President Putin demonstrates how much attention is being paid to problems with the investment and business climate. This forum has also shown just that – ministers’ interventions touched upon this topic. Also, the appointment [of Boris Titov] as business ombudsman was announced. All of this is with reason: At the moment Russia is ranked 120th in the World Bank rating.
 
In December last year, the ASI launched national entrepreneurial initiatives: 22 projects to improve the investment climate. Four projects concern the simplification of the construction permit procedure; access to energy infrastructure; support of exports; and improving customs regulations in order to simplify the procedures of conducting business in Russia, as well as to make them cheaper and faster. These four roadmaps have already been designed and supported by Vladimir Putin and are now starting to be implemented. This is just the beginning. We have already started working on the next four roadmaps. The role of the ASI here is that we coordinate the platform that gathers the entrepreneurial community and officials. Importantly, the working groups are headed by entrepreneurs themselves which is a new approach. They are of course best placed to assess the problems they encounter.

According to the roadmap we have worked out, the costs [of administrative procedures] will decrease by 100 times by 2020. Our aim is to make Russia one of the 20 leading countries in terms of its investment climate. This is our most important task at the moment. Everybody understands it now, including the new government. The fact that the president has appointed a business ombudsman, a man of a very good reputation, someone who has been dealing with these issues for a long time - helping entrepreneurs - is an indication of the attention the president pays to the problems businesses are experiencing. This is very important.

The first result of the ASI’s work is the launch of the national entrepreneurial initiative. Apart from this, the ASI has started supporting concrete projects, trying to focus on systematic problems, which would open the way for many entrepreneurs. We currently have 90 projects in various stages of implementation in the New Business branch. Another task we have is to increase the share of small- and medium-sized businesses in the economy: they are the drivers of economic development.

We are shaping around ASI a type of entrepreneur who is interested, in addition to implementing their projects, in doing something to improve Russia’s investment climate. It is very important to monitor the implementation of the initial roadmaps that we have drawn up as every roadmap implies changes in legislation and control that the laws are being abided by. It is very important that entrepreneurs themselves monitor this. Soon, a presidential commission on national entrepreneurial initiatives will be established. It will be responsible for monitoring how the roadmaps are implemented and how the investment climate is improving.               

Speaking of improving investment climate, are you working with foreign investors on this?

We are completely open to everybody and we use technologies such as crowdsourcing. For example, we called on 600 people to work on the first roadmap and 700 on the second. We are completely open for any interesting proposals and are trying to take all opinions into account. The experience of Western partners will be very important in this regard. We are planning to travel to Singapore, Hong Kong and the U.S. to learn from their experience and see what needs to be done to remove barriers and opportunities for corruption. Our task is to make the system transparent, because ideally entrepreneurs should not have to deal with the state mechanisms. We clearly understand that it will not be achieved overnight. But the fact that this work has started and that the attention to it is very high is a very important signal for the entrepreneurial community here and for investors, including those from the West.  

You are cooperating with the Russian Direct Investment Fund. Could you tell us about it?

We signed one of our first agreements with RDIF and travelled to a number of regions together with [Head of RDIF] Kirill Dmitriev. Our first trip was with foreign investors who manage more than a trillion dollars combined - we went to Ulyanovsk, Sverdlovsk, Krasnoyarsk. Our second trip was to the Republics of Bashkortostan and Tatarstan where we signed a trilateral agreement between ASI, RDIF and the governments of these republics. Our cooperation first and foremost aims to support entrepreneurs and projects. The RDIF has the funds and we provide administrative support, helping to increase the number of projects in the region, change old technical regulation and build communication with authorities at the federal and regional levels. We hope that our cooperation will soon move to the implementation of concrete projects from where they are presently – the development stage. For [foreign] investors these trips are very important as for many it’s their first time in Russia. It’s about exploring numerous opportunities as all of these regions have immense potential for growth. I think, for Europe and the U.S., Russia is currently a unique platform for investment: We have to remove existing barriers and then Russia will make a great leap forward. 

You said in one of your interviews “I wish to prove that ASI is serious and for long. So, I won’t leave until I reach the results.” What are these results for you?

The result for me has two parts. First, it is supporting concrete projects: I plan for the ASI to support 50 to 100 projects. Behind every project is an entrepreneur whose potential we help to realize. But we do not just want to support concrete projects, we also want to build a mechanism that will work like a production line, helping businessmen. My second task is to involve as many entrepreneurs as possible in the work on the business climate and monitoring its effectiveness. Such involvement will give us confidence that we will be able to quickly move up from our 120th place.