Regional aspects of implementing innovations as a lever for economic growth and sustainable development in Russia

摘要

The essential condition for innovation effectiveness ensuring economic growth, increased national competitiveness and other positive changes is innovation implementation in the economic activities of particular enterprises. An innovation policy has to take into account regional aspects because regions play an increasingly important role as sources of innovation changes. The present paper considers the regional aspects of innovation implementation in the Russian federation. The authors have built and analyzed a 2015-2017 ranking of Russian federal constituent entities (regions) on the basis of two indicators: a share of organizations which carried out innovations of all types, and a share of those which implemented technological innovations as a key type of innovation enabling increased labor efficiency, improved product quality and overall economic growth. Range and relative range, variance, standard deviation, and coefficient of variation were calculated as indicators of the level of regional differentiation. The results show a high level of unevenness in innovation activities of organizations across Russian regions; for the three-year period, divergence in the enterprise-level innovation implementation across the regions grew, with a slight decrease in some of the estimated indicators occurring in 2017. Based on the findings, the authors suggest new directions for future research sheet.