On June 5 2009, US ambassador Nancy McEldowney launched the first US-Bulgarian partnership dedicated to Information Technology and Innovation.

"What we are doing today – to put it most simply – is opening a door. We are opening a door to entrepreneurship and economic development, a door to innovation and ingenuity, a door that will lead inevitably to greater transparency, immediacy, and meritocracy," McEldowney said at the launch of the programme.

The partnership project looks to build on Bulgaria’s strengths in information technology and aims to improve the country’s competitive advantage.

The pilot project has received $500 000 in initial US government funding, which is to be matched by the Bulgarian government, with expected future funding provided by private sources.

The current call for concept papers only covers IT and innovation, but future developments could possibly extend the scope of the project to other sectors, though no decisions have been taken in that direction.

The call for proposals will be taken on the road to Bourgas, Plovdiv and Varna in July, where public meetings and presentations will be held, aiming to reach potential applicants outside the capital.

A second project that aims to invest in Bulgaria’s information technology future, is the establishment of the Bulgarian Nanotechnology Center (BNtC), the first centre of its kind in Central and Eastern Europe, for which contracts were signed in May 2009. The creation of the BNtC, for which IBM had been selected as a primary partner, was supported by the US embassy to Bulgaria. Bulgarian partners in the project included several universities, the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences.

The 500 sq m centre, which was expected to open in 2010, would make use of an IBM Blue Gene supercomputer that the State Agency for Information Technology and Communication bought in 2008.

The BNtC was to establish a research facility for nanotechnology and implement a programme of research activities. A third part of the project included the set-up of a consultancy group, including policy makers, industry and legal experts, which will focus on the commercialisation of research results, striving to maximise economic benefit from the research.

Know-how and intellectual property, in the form of patentable inventions that would be made available as marketable nanotech products, were expected to generate new business, directly benefitting Bulgarian industry and generating an income stream that would feed back into the BNtC.