One of the most important tasks that we in The Committee on women's entrepreneurship for the development set for ourselves is to promote women's entrepreneurship and bring our successful women outside of their city, region, district, country. We are interested in large-scale tasks. The idea of an international women's competition was supported by the Chairman of the Committee Nadia Cherkasova and I started the work as a person with extensive experience in international activities. Working with the Ministry of economic development on small and medium-sized business development projects, we understood that APEC market is one of the largest and most promising one. APEC includes 21 economies of the Asia-Pacific region and it is a great opportunity to expand the boundaries of business. This year the contest will celebrate its 5th birthday.

The concept was supposed to capture initially, because the APEC feature is that only the unanimous support of all APEC economies gives the green light to the project. We made a bid for representatives of SMEs in APEC economies who own at least 50% of the business, and then set additional selection criteria. First, each economy in the competition must be represented by only 1 participant. An exception is made only for the economy hosting APEC summits. This immediately launches competitions in APEC economies. And any competition, as you know, is an incentive to develop. In addition, these should be businesses that have already passed the break-even point.

Now we can say that the approach was chosen correctly. We were immediately able to get a large number of participants and viewers.

– Representatives of each economy have their own cultural code, which is superimposed on the personal characteristics of participants, jury members, and official representatives of economies. Therefore, you need to find the right approach to everyone. In addition, above all this diversity of cultures, characters, and habits, there is also the APEC regulation, which imposes additional restrictions and responsibilities. Taking into account all of it is probably the biggest challenge in preparing and conducting the competition.

– Before the first competition, I understood that in order for the story to be successful, it must be large-scale and honest from the very beginning. This required a huge amount of work to involve the economy of working with the jury members.

With each new contest, I realize that I need to keep the brand up all the time, making the contest clear, transparent, and fair. And, most importantly, it is a festive atmosphere. No one should feel like a loser. After all, all the participants who take part in it are already winners. They are the best in their economies.

APEC BEST AWARD is already a brand and a business card of the Russian Federation in APEC. Everyone knows this contest. And it has another mission – to introduce the culture of the Russian Federation, to show our wonderful, active, positive, creative women. After all, it is by remembering us that foreigners will form an idea of Russia