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The plenary session “Intelligent Economy. Three dilemmas for digital nation” attended by Prime Minister of Russia Dmitry Medvedev took place in the Matreshka hall of the Skolkovo Innovation Center on the second day of the Open Innovations forum.

The participants of the plenary session were: Prime Minister of Uzbekistan Abdulla Aripov, Chairman of the Board of Management of Bayer Werner Baumann, Director-Founder of Future of Humanity Institute Nick Bostrom, Google Play Director Purnima Kochikar, Republic of Belarus Prime Minister Syarhey Rumas, Chairman of the board of the Eurasian Economic Commission Tigran Sargsyan.

In his opening speech at the plenary session Dmitry Medvedev outlined the main challenges countries are facing due to the global digitalization – deploying country-level cybersecurity, adaptation of the education system to the consequences of automation and reorganization of the Labor Market, tackling legislative regulation issues related to the usage of digital technologies.

Dmitry Medvedev asked take every possible step so that the regulatory bodies wouldn’t hinder technological development. “Law can never catch up to technological changes, law is conservative in its nature. We have to speed up the process of putting new technologies on the market and for that purpose we have to turn the regulation model upside-down and adopt permissive legal regulations as opposed to prohibitive ones. This is exactly the line of thought behind the new bill on Regulatory Sandboxes, which is currently in development. Such legal framework will allow investors to operate within the law,” noted the Head of the Chamber of Ministers.

Chairman of the Board of Management of Bayer Werner Baumann named global cooperation as one of the main conditions of innovation development: “Knowledge is changing and developing so fast. In the age of exponential growth no company involved into innovation development can walk this path alone. We need to cooperate, to share our experience and competences.”

Google Play President Purnima Kochikar stated that the place of the main driving force of digital economy on the global scale is being taken by companies developing mobile applications, which are mainly concentrated on the export. “Today such companies are moving Russia forward, making people want something more, strive to compete at the international level. This, indeed, cannot be accomplished from the cities they live in directly. That is they are pushing the economy forward, creating hundreds of thousands of jobs, and aren’t immigrating,” stressed Purnima Kochikar.

Summarizing the plenary session Dmitry Medvedev noted that he was convinced in the preparedness of Russia and other world economies to overcome all the challenges of digitalization. The Prime Minister asked not to be afraid of any prognosis of the perspective technology development and reminded the catch phrase Leo Tolstoy described the works of Leonid Andreev with: “He tries to scare me, but I am not afraid!” I think the debates on what will be should follow this exact formula. We shouldn’t be afraid, progress cannot be stopped.”