Thanks to the vision and leadership of Mark Ritchie, Minnesota’s Secretary of State, March 25-26 will be an opportunity to showcase innovation in your community before a high level audience of American and Russian leaders. Here is his announcement with an invitation to participate with a booth or exhibit to inform others about organizations, companies, products, and ideas making a positive difference in your communities.
Conference organizers have selected the Fond du Lac reservation — one of nine communities participating in Blandin Foundation’s Community Broadband Program — to be featured on one of the “tours” described below. Tour participants will hear about the Band’s innovative application of cutting-edge information management and decision-support tools to natural resource management and about youth engagement through technology in the economic life of the Reservation.
Thursday, February 13, 2014
Dear Friends of the Minnesota World’s Fair,
An important step on our path to the Minnesota World’s Fair is taking place this March in St. Paul.
We have been asked by the US State Department, our partners in the bid for the 2023 World’s Fair, to host the next meeting of the official US Russia Innovation Working Group – a high-level dialogue created by President Obama and President Medvedev in 2009, designed to foster innovation through greater collaboration.
Thanks to the generosity of a number of companies, foundations, and research institutes we will be hosting a public conference alongside the official Innovation Working Group on March 25-26, in St. Paul, Minnesota.
This US Russia Innovation Conference will bring together companies, universities, non-profits and research institutes, government agencies, and civic organizations to share best practices, review existing collaborations, and to explore new ways to strengthen US-Russian relations through mutually beneficial trade, investment, research and commercialization.
We already have delegations confirmed from the Embassy of the Russian Federation in Washington, led by Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, and from Russia’s most innovative regions including Tartarstan, Tomsk, Ryazan, Kaluga, Ulyanovsk, Krasnoyarsk, Mordovia, Lipetsk, Sverdlovsk, and Novosibirsk. Many of these delegations will be led by Governors and will include representatives of leading companies, universities and research institutes looking for partners in innovation.
We expect this conference to sell-out, so please sign-up today if you are interested. Let us know if you would like to have a booth or exhibit to inform others about your own company, organizations, products, and ideas. Also, be sure to sign-up for one of the company tours and site visits being offered on the 26th. Finally, if your company or organization would like to be a sponsor of this event or related US Russia Innovation activities that will be occurring throughout the week, please contact me.
Warmly,
Mark Ritchie, Secretary of State, Minnesota