The smart badge - "The Badger", a product of the company "Badger Crew" run by mostly Montenegrins, is currently going from prototype to mass production, and IT experts predict that the company could earn several million euros from this innovation.
For this reason, the company was recently awarded the award of the Ministry of Science for the best innovator of the year.
However, apart from the fact that this start-up (start-up - an innovative technological business that has the potential for rapid growth and large reach) was founded by the citizens of Montenegro, the state will not benefit greatly from it, because the company was founded in the USA, where the product was patented as intellectual property.
The company's executive director, Darko Ivanović, said, however, that he would have founded the company and the patent "without thinking" in Montenegro if there had been minimum conditions for launching a start-up and developing that innovative project.
In order to keep such innovators in Montenegro, the Ministry of Science, led by Minister Sanja Damjanović, initiated the amendment of the Law on Innovation Activities and the adoption of a special law - the Law on Incentive Measures for the Development of Research and Innovation.
Damjanović and Finance Minister Darko Radunović have therefore appointed an interdepartmental working group for the preparation of two laws, which will regulate the system and incentive measures for carrying out innovative activities for legal and natural persons engaged in this activity.
The working group, as announced by the Ministry of Science to "Vijesta", consists of members from the ministries of science, finance, economy, the Tax Administration, the University of Montenegro, the business sector and NGOs.
The new Law on Innovation Activities will, they claim, harmonize the definitions with the manual "OSLO Manual IV" (an international manual for the collection, storage and use of data on innovations), will standardize new types of innovation organizations, the conditions for their registration in the Register of Innovation Organizations, the possibility the establishment of a new implementation body that would carry out the tasks of implementing innovation programs and projects and monitor the implementation of operational goals and activities in the field of innovation activities defined in the Smart Specialization Strategy - S3 (Ministry of Science), and to regulate other issues of importance for this area.
"Lex specialis Law on incentive measures for the development of research and innovation will regulate tax incentives for research and innovation organizations and natural persons - inventors/innovators, which will contribute to the increase of input factors in this activity: the number of engaged people, financial investments, capital investments in research, development and innovation in order to achieve the strengthening of new growth factors for our economy", states the agreement of the Ministry of Science to "Vijesta".
Ivanovic said that he is not familiar with the changes in the law, but that he is happy that future innovators will have a more favorable environment for business development than those who started their business five years ago.
Software engineer Dragan Čabarkapa, representative of the community of Montenegrin programmers, claims that the current legal framework that treats the area of innovation "is not adequate" and that it "does not have the appropriate effects in practice".
"If you were to compare with Estonia, for example, taking into account the difference in population, we should have at least two technology companies worth more than one billion euros today. Today in Montenegro, we have a startup company that is worth several million euros, and mathematically we are behind approximately 1.000 times", said Čabarkapa to "Vijesta".
He said that there is an understanding of the institutions that some change is needed, and that they saw this goodwill for support in the communication with representatives of the Ministry of Science at the beginning of 2019.
"This confidence that there is a sincere desire for change was the inspiration for founding our small but rapidly growing community of people who are engaged in professional software development (computer programs). Through this cooperation with the Ministry of Science, we organize education in the field of advanced IT technologies such as 'cloud computing' (the technology of storing files on the Internet) and we try to connect the local IT community with the company 'Amazon Web Services', which is a global technological leader in that field." , states Čabarkapa.
The working group started working on the preparation of two laws, and the last session was held on Monday. To amend the law, they use the practice of the European Union in that area and the publication of the expert team of the European Commission.
"Also, important inputs were obtained on the basis of the Study 'Incentives for innovation activity: Analysis of the current situation and recommendations for the introduction of incentives for innovation activity in Montenegro', which was carried out by the Podgorica company "SPIN", in June 2019, and whose was initiated by the Ministry of Science through the World Bank INVO/HERIC project", the answer reads.
The Ministry of Science announced that the deadline for preparing proposals for these laws and submitting them to the Government for determination is the third quarter of 2020.
The deadline for passing the law in the Parliament is the fourth quarter of 2020.
Necessary favorable loans, tax and administrative benefits
Ivanovic said that in Montenegro you cannot currently raise a loan for a start-up company because banks take a mortgage as a guarantee, but not intellectual property.
"In the USA, the situation is different because people are ready to invest in patents, which are registered as intellectual property, and they can be pledged as a guarantee for a loan, which you take out in order to develop them," he said.
Čabarkapa believes that the most needed incentive for innovators is the release or significant reduction of tax duties, while immediately following is the reduction of administrative obligations and obstacles that innovators have to jump over in order to be able to apply for various grants and incentives.
"When you're trying to be innovative, you don't have time to deal with bureaucracy. As an example of one such obstacle, the current proposal in the future law is to make it a requirement for innovators to have certain high academic titles as well as a certain number of team members with those titles. Although it is clear to us that this condition is intended to make the work of evaluators easier, it is not good because innovators do not fit into a certain mold. The world's greatest innovators, such as the founders of the companies 'Microsoft', 'Apple', and 'Facebook', would not meet this criterion because they never graduated from university," explained Čabarkapa.
He assessed that the goal of the new law is to encourage the activities of innovators and that this must be achieved even at the cost of evaluators having a more extensive and difficult task to evaluate whom to support.
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