Business leader says technological nation requires well-developed system designed by gov't, private sector

Romania needs a well-developed system designed by the government and the private sector in order to become a technological nation, Florin Jianu, chairman of the National Council of Romania's Privately-Owned SMEs (CNIPMMR), told the launch conference on Tuesday of the "Romania Tech Nation" initiative. "This is eminently a demarche of the private sector, but as the president [Klaus Iohannis] said, a technological nation, a Romania Tech Nation, requires a system, as well as players, a government and the private sector to create it. Technological education is extremely important, but so is entrepreneurship education to create new generations of entrepreneurs. There are other tools we propose, tools for financing, such as Digital Romania, a tool that will be included in the next programming period 2021-2027 to finance areas such as artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, advanced digital skills and digital transformation. We have a third project, a third proposal that I am very fond of personally and that I generically called ‘Destination Romania,' a project to attract not only researchers and valuable people from Romania, but also talents from other countries. Why not positioning ourselves as a hub to attract entrepreneurial talents for technology and research-development-innovation?" said Jianu. The Auditorium of the Polytechnic University of Bucharest on Tuesday hosted the launch of the "Romania Tech Nation," a CNIPMMR initiative, jointly with Banca Comerciala Romana (BCR), an event held under the high patronage of the President of Romania. "Romania Tech Nation" represents a multiannual project with polycentric events which main objective is to boost Romania's transformation through technology. In CNIPMMR's vision, the first step towards achieving this objective is steering the key actors in three strategic directions: an entrepreneurial ecosystem, an entrepreneurial education ecosystem and public policies, with annual tactical objectives, and strategic ones in in 5 and 10 years. AGERPRES (RO - author: Daniel Badea; EN - author; Corneliu-Aurelian Colceriu, editor: Adina Panaitescu)