The methodology for building a point system, forming an investment climate and attracting investors contributes to the fact that interregional cooperation is developing poorly. Everyone is fighting for investors, everyone is trying to drag them to their site. The exchange of experience has already been discussed here. It does not really happen, including because there is a fight for investors, and there is no desire to share with neighbors their opportunities, their developments.

The role of personality

And where it is necessary to do this, because, say, the state orders it, then certain elements of this process, mainly related to the role of the individual, are still not shown. Who is responsible for this process in the corresponding region? The governor, or his deputy, or the minister, or the deputy minister. The result depends on how effective this person shows himself to be. There are regions where even a person who is not the highest in position has organizational skills, gathers a team around himself, and very quickly shows good effectiveness.

Former Deputy Governor of the Kaluga Region, and now Governor of the Ryazan Region, Nikolai Nikolaevich Lyubimov is a classic example of this kind of action. Having come to Ryazan, he has already launched several brilliant, in our opinion, projects - from a smart city to the use of artificial intelligence in assessing intra-organizational interaction between departments. And in fact, he is now the leader in the digital organization of the activities of governments, ministries and departments at the regional level.

Interaction with experts

It is very important how the relevant regional leader interacts with experts. For example, in our “Business Russia” 250 experts took a very active part in assessing how specialized organizations work with investors in the regions behave. A lot of interesting things were revealed. Firstly, the information presentation of the relevant opportunities is not always done in a way that is understandable to the investor. At the first stage, it seems like there is complete openness. And at the following stages, a bureaucratic wadded situation begins to arise, which is not good and very repulsive to investors right away. Experience. If, say, some region has created, introduced some information system for interaction with investors, with entrepreneurs, and in the neighboring region it is organized much better, then try to drag this positive experience to this region. There is already a system of ordering and contracting for the relevant work, everything is done, done. And there is absolutely no desire to study why they turned out to be worse than their neighbor, and what technologies the neighbor used in order to create such a good system.

Who are the judges?

Or an assessment of the activities of this specialized organization for working with investors. Who makes this assessment? There is a certain system of formal indicators that was developed by the ASI, including not without our participation (I mean the Chamber of Commerce and Industry, the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs, Delovaya Rossiya, Opora). But there are specific business needs. It is not enough to tick a box: such-and-such a program was developed, participated in such-and-such an event, gave such-and-such a presentation, organized such-and-such a forum, so many people took part in it. More important is how many agreements were actually concluded, how many investment projects were launched, how quickly [investors] fulfill their plans and schedules, ahead of schedule or behind schedule, whether they managed to attract the appropriate financing. These specific questions that worry businesses implementing investment projects are rarely asked because they are more complex, harder to answer, harder to report on.

Moderator's question

You have already launched over 200 projects with the Industrial Development Fund. Which of them are the most successful?

Anton Danilov-Danilyan: 230 have been actually financed. More than 300 have been approved. The most striking, probably, from the point of view of both social significance and how the business is done in this area is the company "Ortomoda": special footwear for the disabled and people with orthopedic problems. And we have already managed to come out positively from three projects.

Or in some regions there are several specialized organizations working with investors. Some have "entrepreneurship" in their name, some have "small, medium business" in their name, and some are engaged in attracting only large ones. As a result, some go to the forest, some get firewood. Too many cooks spoil the broth. And a lot of these junction points arise - not only interregional, but also intraregional.

A unified system is needed

The hope is that a system will emerge in which there will be information about each applicant to all development institutions, including both federal and regional levels of specialized organizations, so that it will be possible to understand who is active and who is passive. If someone is passive, then there will be an opportunity to at least talk: why are you passive, what do you not understand, what do you not like, what are you afraid of?

There is no such system now. We have 86 subjects of the Russian Federation – do you know how many different decisions there are that regulate investment activities? We counted – more than 800. That is, on average, 10 for each region. This is a completely unfathomable number.

Let's take strategic planning documents - there is a whole register in pursuance of the law on strategic planning. But there are, excuse me, several tens of thousands of documents. And all of this is not brought into some more or less understandable system, so that it could be worked with by keywords. Moreover, I will be surprised if more than five people raise their hand that they tried to work with this register in this room. Almost certainly no one has even heard of it, let alone walked around there.

These problems are of great concern to us. And this is a slightly different side of the activity that we would very much like to develop in ASI. Some formal indicators, even such as Doing Business, are one thing. The actual needs of entrepreneurs are another matter.

The text was prepared based on the speech at the IV Yalta International Economic Forum, held by the Vedomosti newspaper on April 19, 2018 in Yalta. All positions are indicated as of the time of the conference

Formal assessments and reality