Schwarzenegger to lead tech delegation to Russia

California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger will lead a delegation to Russia next week to meet with President Dmitry Medvedev and visit the future Russian “Silicon Valley”, organisers said Wednesday.

The delegation venture capitalists, investors and policymakers from the real Silicon Valley arrives on Monday, on the heels of a June visit by Medvedev to the Californian tech hub, according to the visit’s programme.

The Russian president and Schwarzenegger’s delegation are to meet on the second day of the four-day visit to Russia, organised as part of a forum on innovations.

The way Russia is presented by American media is “not very attractive, that is why the investors would like to see Russia with their own eyes,” Alexandra Johnson, president of Global Technology Symposium, the event’s US organiser, said at a press conference Wednesday.

The group will be shown around Skolkovo, the future site of “Innograd” or innovation town, where the Russian president is hoping to advance Russian technology and attract foreign investment.

“We need to show to our partners that Russia’s policies on innovation is a long-term project,” said Mikhail Chuchkevich, head of the project department at Rusnano, a state corporation set up to promote nanotechnology in Russia.

In order to “better understand the possibilities and risks of the Russian market”, the Silicon Valley guests, including representatives from Oracle, Microsoft and Google, will also be taken to Kazan in Tatarstan, Chuchkevich said.

Tech-savvy Medvedev was inspired by his visit to California to start a Twitter microblog on which he raved about the atmosphere in Silicon Valley. “I would like to create a similar environment in Russia,” he wrote.

Innograd Skolkovo’s construction was launched this year near the eponymous village south of Moscow.