MINSK, 23 December (BelTA) - The China-Belarus S&T cooperation center was inaugurated in the Great Stone industrial park on 23 December, BelTA has learned.
The center will be the park's first comprehensive platform to nurture innovative entrepreneurship and cooperation in science and technology. It will house research laboratories, incubation and acceleration zones for start-ups, a testing center and a small-scale production center, and a hall to showcase achievements.
The facility was built on Beijing Avenue with the use of technical and economic assistance from the People's Republic of China. The five-storied building with a total area of about 19,000 square meters has a complex geometric shape in the form of a mathematical sign of infinity.
The center is a key system-forming project for the park, head of the Great Stone park administration Aleksandr Yaroshenko said at the opening ceremony. The center's mission is transformation of scientific and technological achievements as the Great Stone park is an innovative, high-tech forward-leaning project. "Based on this, the center was conceived as a platform to give impetus to the development of startups and projects from an idea to business ," explained Alexander Yaroshenko.
A pool of financial participants has already been formed to help startups. They will also be able to rely on consulting, legal, accounting support. Membership in the center will be based on a competitive selection.
Subjects of innovation activity will be given benefits similar to those provided to the residents of the park. In two years, if the project is successful, it can become a resident of the Great Stone park.
"If you do not support startups, their success rate hovers around 15-20%. But foreign experience, that of China as well, shows that active promotion and support of innovative ideas increases this rate to 75-80%," Aleksandr Yaroshenko added.
Director General of Great Stone Industrial Park Development Company Yan Gang hailed the opening of this center as a historic milestone. “This is the first S&T cooperation center to be built overseas with Chinese technical and economic assistance. This means that China is rising to an even higher level in science and technology and R&D cooperation with foreign countries,” said Yan Gang.
Among those who will work in the center is the China-Belarus Innovation Center of Industrial Technologies, set up by the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus and the Academy of Sciences of Guangdong Province, China. The program Spark will be launched here in Q1 2021 to assist research projects of the two countries.
Yan Gang is confident that in 2021 all of the space in the center will be rented out. “I hope that we will have a second incubation center for scientific and technological achievements,” he added.
The China-Belarus Industrial Park Great Stone is a special economic zone with a special legal regime, located 25km away from Minsk. Nearly 70 residents from 14 countries are registered in the Great Stone. The priority areas for the park are engineering, electronics and telecommunications, biotechnology, pharmaceuticals, new materials, logistics, e-commerce, big data storage and processing.
