The role of government

Governments have important roles to play in shaping the performance of their national innovation systems. Beyond the support for R&ampD, a wide array of public policies needs to be mobilised covering areas as diverse as education and training, competition and trade, and industrial and regional development. These policy areas utilise a mix of instruments, including regulation and direct funding. The coherence and effectiveness of this mix and of overall governance arrangements are major concerns for innovation policy makers. This chapter provides first a brief account of the evolution of Russia’s STI policy over the last two decades, paying particular attention to the main actors and their roles and the achievements and shortcomings of the prevailing governance arrangements. It then considers the public funding of R&ampD, specifically the overall trends in budgetary support, the main funding patterns by institutional type, and the use of selectivity and priority programmes. This is followed by a functional assessment of Russia’s innovation policy that takes a number of strategic tasks as its starting points. These include securing the availability of qualified human resources adapting public R&ampD institutes to the requirements of a modern innovation system promoting business R&ampD and innovation fostering the development of competitive innovation-oriented industries providing supporting infrastructure to innovators harnessing global opportunities through international co-operation and developing and mobilising regional innovation capabilities. The chapter finishes with some concluding remarks.