October 18 – President of Texas Institute of Science Laslo Olah and director of regional development in Russia Alexandra Karasina visited KFU and had a meeting with rector Ilshat Gafurov with a purpose of introducing successful business model of science development.

According to Laslo Olah, the Institute owns a database of 18,000 specialists from 230 universities and 800 laboratories from around the world functioning on a permanent basis. Research teams from different universities are organized specifically for concrete business projects. As a rule, an average project involves scholars from three universities. Thus, Texas Institute of Science acts as an intermediary between the client and the project team. In addition, the transfer of intellectual property defines legal and commercial suitability of innovations and inventions, allocates funding, provides legal protection for designs and commercializes the ideas, making these areas particularly important in project implementation.

Rector Gafurov in his turn pointed out that a similar system is already functioning at Engineering Institute at KFU and emphasized the changing nature of Kazan University involving not only structural reorganization but also the shift in research priorities. The detailed tour took place later at the Institutes of Physics, Chemistry and Petroleum Technologies.