Kazakhstan seeks to join top 30 innovation ecosystems by 2025
The national innovation ecosystem contains several parts, including infrastructure, member preferences, investments, R&D centers and programming schools, corporate investments, technology entrepreneurship.
“On 26 December 2018 the law was adopted laying down a preferential tax regime. Its conditions are available to all IT companies around the country, with the Astana Hub’s members given special conditions for attracting foreign specialists such as no quota mechanism and labor visa for five years”, Askar Zhumagaliyev, Minister of Digital Development, Defense and Aerospace Industry, said.
One of the main tasks of the Astana Hub is to create a favorable circumstance to draw investments.
“Last year saw the adoption of the law on venture financing, which led to creation of the business angels club as well as the professional venture capital fund”, he said.
For the time being, over 15 memorandums have been signed as well as the agreement with the South Korean Government to found an international IT center under the Astana Hub. Joint work with the Asian Development Bank is underway.
The Ministry of Digital Development, Defense and Aerospace Industry took on innovation-related activities, drumming up grant support to projects, rising the number of IT projects subject to support, establishing a project support system in all key stages of development. 16 R&D centers were commissioned for startups’ research and educational support; thus, they can receive consultations and technological support as well as access to the programs of the R&D centers.
“One of the development drivers of the ecosystem are orders from the production sector. There is a broad base of competitive IT companies and startups”, the Minister stressed.
The American Agency Startup Genome’ research revealed the city of Nur-Sultan is in the top 5 ecosystems in terms of affordability of the market of IT specialists. IT hubs are being opened nationwide.
The Minister also shared the expectations for 2022.
“We are sure we will attract startup investments of up to 82 billion tenge. The share of domestic content in the IT services will rise by at least 70%. We plan to enter the top 30 innovation ecosystems by 2025”, the Minister told.
The Astana Hub’s Director General Joseph Ziegler pointed out that last year marked the Hub as the number 1 IT center throughout the country, with more than 500 events held for IT specialists gathering overall 20 thousand participants.
“Different scientific centers are being developed together with multinational corporations such as Cisco, IBM, Huawei. We are also working with local companies including Tengizchevroil with which we have the ongoing campaign to deal with IT issues”, Joseph Ziegler said.
He outlined innovation takes the biggest part of the national agenda to develop living standards throughout the regions as well as the creation of the Ministry of Digital Development, Defense and Aerospace Industry is consistent with the experiences of the developed countries such as Singapore, Israel and Estonia.
Joseph Ziegler called for considering regional development.
“If you look at Belarus, Georgia and India, we can come up with clusters in the IT sphere, entrepreneurship as well as in spheres that are far away from big cities, however thanks to communication and technologies we can develop a big business. I urge to promote growth through the Astana Hub, our program of regional road shows as part of which we will visit all the regions and cities of republican significance”, he told.
The Astana Hub’s Director General extended the support for the digitalization and innovation agenda and expressed the hope that Kazakhstan will be among other states to develop the next generation of solutions and endeavors to develop the global economy.
Kazakh Prime Minister Askar Mamin outlined that the World Economic Forum’s estimates showed IT development would bring extra opportunities for the public and business.
“As of today, in Kazakhstan the IT market demonstrates the significant growth. To further develop the IT sector, it is important first to keep on forming the innovation ecosystem of the IT sector under the Astana Hub as well as aligning resources of the IT ecosystem, universities, government preferences, technology entrepreneurs for the sake of further innovation breakthrough and effective synergy. Second, it is essential to promote our innovation findings to attract investors and venture capital. Third, greater engagement of the regions to ensure the innovation ecosystem develops dynamically, it is necessary to build a constructive cooperation between the center and the regions,” the PM said.
Concluding his speech, the PM gave the Ministry of Digital Development instructions to develop a roadmap for developing a national innovation ecosystem and synergy with the Astana Hub in two weeks.
Adlet Seilkhanov
