High hopes for Russia's nanotech firms

摘要

Russia's investment in the very small is about to get bigger. The government announced this month that it is injecting 318 billion roubles (US$11 billion) into its ambitious plan to develop and commercialize nanotechnologies. Over the past two years, the Russian government has spent nearly 94 billion roubles on the effort. The goal is to establish a self-supporting domestic high-tech industry by 2015, to help reduce the country's dependence on oil and gas exports. But so far the project has created only 2,000 or so new jobs and a small number of public-private ventures.