We are strengthening the partnership with NATO, Montenegro to join the Innovation Fund

The Montenegrin economy can make better use of certain benefits from NATO membership in the coming period, and one of the opportunities is the NATO Innovation Fund, it was assessed in Brussels at the meeting of Minister of Finance and Social Welfare Milojko Spajić and Minister of Economic Development Jakov Milatović with Assistant Secretary General for Defence Investment Camille Grand and Assistant Secretary General for Emerging Security Challenges David van Weel. 

The meetings assessed that the new Government of Montenegro is a reliable partner of NATO.

Our participation in NATO, which is currently around 1.8%, was assessed very positively because we are on a very good path to have 2% of GDP needed for security and defence by 2024, as agreed at the Summit in Wales in 2014 and we are one of the few countries that gives real impulses in that direction. The Ministry of Finance, which should be very conservative on this issue, is very open in this case because we are aware that defence is very important for the economy of Montenegro, and not only for geostrategic issues, Spajić said after the meeting.

We are glad to have opened some new topics such as the NATO Innovation Fund, which fits well into the strategy of the Government of Montenegro, and we think that we will have a very interesting initiative that could start in December this year, Spajić concluded.

We talked about all the things that the new Government of Montenegro has done when it comes to improving the resilience of the economy, all in the context of geopolitics. Another important thing we talked about is the way in which the economy of Montenegro can use certain benefits of NATO membership in the coming period. We have paid a lot of attention to a new idea, the NATO Innovation Fund. We hope that, after presenting the idea to other Cabinet members, Montenegro will join the Fund, Milatović said.