Anatoly Motkin to the Baltic Times: transition to the knowledge driven economy creates a new social class in Eurasia

StrategEast President Anatoly Motkin has revealed in his interview to the Baltic Times what are the StrategEast key activity directions and the global mission.

“StrategEast’s key mission is to promote transformation of economy in the countries which have restored or declared independence after the breakup of the Soviet Union (excluding Russia) from a traditional, resource-oriented model to the knowledge driven economy.”

“This transformation, based on the aforementioned values, would allow to better integrate the economy of this region into global economic system, inevitably increasing capitalization of each of these countries by several orders of magnitude.” – told Anatoly.

Motkin believes the key to Westernization, i.e. to the adoption by countries of Eurasian region of such fundamental Western values as rule of law and private property protection, lies in the transition from the resource-oriented model to the knowledge driven economy.

Thus he considers StrategEast Westernization Index released biannually as an indicator helping evaluate StrategEast’s own performance.

StrategEast has highlighted the IT industry as the fastest growing sector fueling significant economic upturn and creating many new jobs in the industry itself and in multiple other non related sectors. Moreover, the IT industry is becoming an important factor of economic growth.

“For us, the IT industry is more than just an economic phenomenon. It is a social phenomenon. Due to the work ethic that IT professionals in region acquire, they have contributed to global economic growth. Effective cross-cultural communication with foreign colleagues has enabled them to absorb best practices of Western corporate culture.” – explained Motkin.

With this in mind, StrategEast has launched Global Minds Initiative – a first systematic approach to the IT industry development in Eurasian countries. As part of it there has been launched an IT Hubs project – large educational project, creating jobs for it’s graduates, implemented jointly with one of the leading US engineering companies – EPAM.

The full interview is available at the Baltic Times