OREANDA-NEWS. January 19, 2016. Moscow School of Management SKOLKOVO summed up the large-scale educational programme for training management teams to develop single-industry towns, which was organized and implemented jointly with the Single-Industry Town Development Foundation. The programme participants presented to the committee their projects developed in the course of training.

The teams participating in the programme included representatives of business and government of Naberezhnye Chelny (Republic of Tatarstan), Yurga and Anzhero-Sudzhensk (Kemerovo Region), Luza (Kirov Region), Krasnoturyinsk (Sverdlovsk Region), Kaspiysk (Republic of Dagestan), and Nadvoitsy (Republic of Karelia).

The educational programme included five training modules, which were held on the Campus of the Business School from September to December 2015. The programme was conducted by professors of the Moscow School of Management SKOLKOVO with experience of work at the world’s best business schools. The participants also met with leading experts in the field of urban and territorial development, investors and entrepreneurs, heads of leading corporations, and representatives of federal and regional authorities.

The objective of the educational programme was to prepare project teams that would be able to implement projects aimed at the development of single-industry towns.

As a result of the programme, each of the single-industry towns had a newly established management team, which included representatives of regional and municipal authorities, businesses, and private investors. According to the management teams’ graduation projects presented by the participants upon completion of the programme, high-tech productions worth over RUB 60 billion will be established in seven single-industry towns, which will provide about 10 thousand new jobs.

The projects to diversify the economy of towns and cities with difficult socio-economic situations involve the creation of industrial parks, the residents of which, according to the plan, will include companies processing industrial waste, chemical, machine-building, and lumbering enterprises. In addition, new production facilities are to be launched in the field of construction materials and agriculture. Furthermore, it is planned to set up a transport and logistics park and a pharmaceutical plant as well as to build an oil refinery in the Kemerovo Region.

The expert panel, which included Ilya Krivogov, Chief Executive Officer of the Single-Industry Town Development Foundation, and Andrei Sharonov, Dean of the Moscow School of Management SKOLKOVO, praised the results of the project team training.

“During the inter-module training period, the teams practiced the new knowledge and skills, which they acquired at the School, in their single-industry towns. Therefore, the investment projects submitted by the trained teams by the end of the training are nothing less than elaborated concrete plans of action to improve the economic situation of the single-industry towns the managers come from. These plans will serve as the basis for a comprehensive modernization of the economy of the problem towns at the beginning of 2016. The business initiatives developed under the programme are to be implemented within three years using budget funds and private investment”, said Ilya Krivogov, Chief Executive Officer of the Single-Industry Town Development Foundation.

In turn, Deputy Chairman of Vnesheconombank Irina Makieva is sure that the programme has facilitated the choice of the best option for the economic development of single-industry towns as well as helped to improve the interaction between business and government.

“In most cases, the problems of investment projects implementation in single-industry towns are associated with two challenges: lack of competence of both the initiators of the projects and local authorities and the inability of the authorities and business to come to understanding, which leads to the “freezing” of the projects and, as a consequence, to stagnation in the economy of single-industry towns. In other words, each party tries to get its own way instead of working as a single mechanism. I believe that in this programme we have managed to address this issue and developed specific investment projects that will bring the economy of the problem territories to a new, higher level of development”, concluded Irina Makieva.

“The objective of the programme was to build project teams that would include regional and municipal leaders, representatives of the core enterprises, investors and entrepreneurs, that is, people who will change the town’s business environment, search for and create new opportunities for the use of labour and capital, and influence the situation of work force availability. Judging by the projects that we have seen today, we have coped with this task. Now the most important thing is not to slow down but rather to enter the phase of implementation of the initiatives developed with unabated zest”, said Andrei Sharonov, Dean of the Moscow School of Management SKOLKOVO.