Question:
Alexander: A year has passed since the moment of the Park’s creation. It is impossible to make some conclusions or sum up the results, but, according to you, what are the most important results of the Park’s activity?

Answer:
Actually you are right – it usually takes 3 or 4 years to assess the effectiveness of some project. In Russia they plan to make the first evaluations of their techno parks activities only by 2010. However, due to the fact that we adopted the extraterritorial principle, our companies may enjoy the state support measures right now instead of waiting for the infrastructure to be created. This feature distinguishes our Park from the similar concepts in Russia, Ukraine and other CIS countries, where residents of techno parks may enjoy the measures of state support only within a limited territory. Thus in the development of information technologies we are in advance by at least 3 or 4 years.

As for June 21, 2007 the Hi Tech Park has as its residents 26 companies, 1 individual entrepreneur and 5 business projects of state enterprises and institutions.

Our Park is to a great degree export oriented. About 80 per cent of the produced software is made for export. In 2006 this figure was $ 22 mln., which exceeds the corresponding figures of 2005 by 263 per cent. The rates of growth are preserved in 2007. Thus, the export production volume in the 1st quarter of the year is $ 8, 7 mln. and increased in more than 3 times compared to the corresponding period of the previous year.

Question:
I have recently read on the site that the Hi Tech Park that it has recently concluded some agreements with the Techno Park of China and that of Finland – Technopolis. What advantages does it offer to the HTP except of the international recognition?

Answer:
International recognition is actually not of minor importance. Companies – residents of Swedish, Finnish, Indian, Chinese and other parks closely follow the events within their own technological parks. These are such world famous companies as Philips, Nokia, Siemens which keep watching the development of cooperation of their parks with our HTP. Some residents of the Parks with which we have concluded relative agreements, decided to start up R&D centers in our HTP. Thus, we expect that in August-September the Belarusian Hi Tech Park will register the fifth largest European company in the area of TietoEnator software development. We expect that TietoEnator, Abaxia as well as the leading world corporations in software development – Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, Cisco, etc. will take part in the workshop “IT-education in the Republic of Belarus” which will be held on June 29, 2007. But the attention on behalf of the leading world corporations to the Belarusian High Tech Park is not all. Another important factor is that we have a great challenge – in 3 or 4 years we want to become a Park up to the world standard. That is why cooperation with the leading techno parks of the world allows us to apply their best experience and practices. We want to do everything carefully from the very beginning so that we won’t have to re –do it in the future. We can avoid the development by the trial and error method, many parks, which are world leaders today, didn’t manage to avoid it.

Question:
Victor: How many graduates of the Belarusian technical universities were employed in the Hi Tech Park this year? Was there some competition and if yes – to what companies?

Answer:
In 2006 98 per cent of the newly created jobs are taken by graduates of universities and young IT specialists not older than 30 years old. In 2006 the number of newly created jobs was 795, 244 new jobs have been already created.

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