site.btaGovernment Will Adopt Wednesday Bill on Innovation

At its weekly meeting on Wednesday, the government will approve a new bill on innovations and by the end of the week it will be submitted to the National Assembly, Prime Minister Nikolay Denkov said here Tuesday. He was speaking during a National Innovation Forum "Innovation and Sustainable Growth", which was held today in Sofia. In Denkov's words, this is a step in the right direction. "What we still need to do is set in place the kind of quality criteria, control mechanisms, organization and transparency, which will allow us to invest boldly, because unlike 10 years ago, now there is money, we just shouldn't waste it," said the Prime Minister.

The most important thing is to make sure this funding goes for quality projects and be able to tell apart real science and pseudoscience, he said.

"The difference between some investments that then multiply and become 10 and 100 and others that sink and nobody can find the trace of the money if you do not have proper organisation and control mechanisms is also not big," Denkov added.

He mentioned several major Bulgarian projects that are at European and world level, such as the Insight Institute, which is a unique project for Central and Eastern Europe, the Big Data for Smart Society Institute (GATE) at Sofia University, as well as the PlantaSYST Institute in Plovdiv. On a par with these is the supercomputer in the Sofia Tech Park: "one of the research and applied structures that make Bulgaria unique in the wider region", to use the Prime Minister's words. "If we look farther east, at Plovdiv, Stara Zagora, Burgas and Varna, you can see [innovation] facilities cropping up and they are unique and there is a reason to learn about them because they have things to offer to foreign investors," Denkov added.