Writing in the Moscow Times, economist Vladislav Inozemtsev has a bold and simple idea to modernize the Russian economy – and it doesn’t involve a top-down approach to force through an innovation center in the Skolkovo valley.  The economy can’t diversify without private and foreign Russian companies increasing capacity, thus requiring the import of mass quantities of industrial machinery – a process severely hampered by meaningless bureaucratic red tape.

The main obstacle has been the need to certify equipment and adapt it to Russian technical standards. In most cases, the official review of a project’s documentation — checking the industrial safety of technical devices, buildings and structures — takes months on end to complete and eats up a significant part of investors’ energy and resources. It is also necessary to translate large numbers of documents, working with suppliers to change specific assemblages and mechanisms to obtain Russian certification. Even during the economically difficult year of 2008-09, Russia imported $159.9 billion in industrial equipment. At 52.2 percent, this became not only the leading but the main category of Russian imports.