Innovation in Kazakhstan: From Ideas to Impact

Whether it happens among students in a classroom or engineers in a laboratory, innovation is a process that begins with an idea and results in transformative trends and business start-ups that can boost a country’s economic development. 

For Kazakhstan, innovation has the potential to unleash the private sector as the country strives to build a more diversified and competitive economy.

Launched by the Kazakh Ministry of Education and Science and the World Bank, and building on the impressive achievements of the Bank’s Technology Commercialization Project over the past 12 years, the Fostering Productive Innovation Project (FPIP) promotes and develops commercial innovations in Kazakhstan by providing grants to entrepreneurs and start-ups seeking to improve the quality of people’s lives.

The primary objective of the FPIP for Kazakhstan is to promote high-quality, nationally relevant research on, and the commercialization of, new technologies.

The projects that receive the inclusive innovation consortia grants are varied in their nature and application.

“X-matrix,” which produces biological dressings with highly efficient healing properties for the treatment of burns and wounds based on an extracellular xenogenic matrix, is one of the many successful grantees. A leading researcher at X-matrix, Kabylbek Abugaliyev, is a fervent advocate of recruiting young researchers to help him in his research and development of biological dressings for treatment solutions for large wounds.

ReLive, a start-up company based at Nazarbaev University, has developed a unique platform designed to rehabilitate patients after a stroke through groundbreaking artificial intelligence–supported neuro-rehabilitation robotic software.

The United Nations has recognized the start-up’s invention as one of the world’s top 20 innovative solutions.

The FPIP has helped to improve the quality of scientific research in Kazakhstan and its relevance to market needs, research and development spending, and collaboration between universities and industry.

The project has also strengthened the capacity of key institutions of the National Innovation System by introducing market-oriented approaches to the selection and support of innovation projects and technology start-ups. Moreover, it has contributed significantly to the country’s ability to effectively collaborate in funding international-level research and development and in changing the mindset of the scientific community and policy makers to look more closely at Kazakhstan’s economic development through direct engagement and dialogue with the private sector.